If...

Some have said that “if” is the biggest word in the English language.  It certainly does have a lot of import on our thinking, be it blame, regret, or thankfulness.  Our lives are certainly filled with choice points of our own doing or the actions of others.  “If my teacher hadn’t suggested,,,, then I might not have…”  “If I hadn’t asked for a raise, would I have ever gotten one.”, and on and on.

I have so many “if’s” in my life that got me to this moment of typing on a laptop that I could probably fill this issue of the Reader.  And you would have fallen asleep by the fourth page.

One of my early if’s is if my parents hadn’t divorced, would my mother have moved us in with her aunt and uncle?  That determined where I started school.  If my great aunt and uncle hadn’t bought a house on the other side of the city, would I have have gone to a second elementary school.  At that school I met many others who would become life-long friends.

I did lose those contacts when my mother decided to rent an apartment on the other side of town.  By the time I started high school, she remarried and we moved back to the other side of town.

That house was in a school attendance area different than the area many of my old friends were in.  I made the choice of asking for an exemption to go to that smaller school to be with my friends again.

One of the math teachers at the smaller school punctuated his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology.  Five of us started as freshmen there a year or two later.

But would I have been able to afford the $750/year tuition?  The assistant principal suggested that I apply to the Huntington Fund for a scholarship.  I did and was granted a full scholarship.

With my job at Kroger’s, suggested to me by one of the friends I met in the second elementary school and with whom I still correspond, I was able to afford books and bus fare across the city to Case.

Shortly after we moved back across the city, I attended a Methodist Church within a half-hour’s walk and was active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF).  This continued into my Case years.

I don’t know the exact cause, but I started losing interest in my engineering studies.  I ran for president of the area MYF council and won.  Also on the council was the daughter of a doctor.  After I flunked out of Case, I started dating her.

We both went to Ohio Wesleyan the following fall, she as a freshman and me as a junior.  Despite my flunking out of Case, the Huntington Fund kept funding me.  They had long dropped their maximum scholarship to $500, and I had to take out student loans to supplement it and my own part-time job earnings to make the $1,100 annual tuition.

I got good enough grades in mathematics that Case took me back in the graduate program with a full fellowship in the computer center which included a $75/week salary!  I also married that sweetheart from two paragraphs back.

I don’t think you want to put up with two thousand words of all the twists and turns of the next fifty plus years, but I have many, many “If I hadn’t done this, would this interesting thing have happened.”  I’ll try to collapse those into the few paragraphs remaining of my space.

We chose to move to Minnesota and my employment with Univac because we liked canoeing.  After five years I became restless and managed a transfer to Europe.  We started in Switzerland for a few weeks and then lived in Italy for the next two years.

I became unhappy with the management in Rome and transferred to Sweden.  We liked Sweden so much that we stayed four years.  But then my wife decided our kids should go to junior high in the United States.  Another “if” I must stick in is that my wife met an American women on the subway who had a cabin in Brimson.  She extended an open invitation to visit them.

I gave a wishy-washy description of my interests to my previous bosses at Univac in Roseville, and so we didn’t move back to Minnesota.  Instead I wound up in “exile” in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.  I was “rescued” when Univac needed people to work on a new computer in Roseville.  That computer was cancelled and I was put on another project, on which I didn’t shine.

Meanwhile, the microcomputer revolution started and I jumped into it.  I blew that too and wound up as a bus driver.  But my wife was doing quite well in her work.  What we didn’t do well on was co-ordinating when we would take our annual BWCA visit.  With the background of a whole bunches of “if’s” we finally visited our friends in Brimson and did so annually.

Yikes, what if I could have 2,000 words!

Our son went to Japan and when we visited him we missed an annual visit to Brimson.  We went in fall instead and found property for sale.  We bought it, and a few years later had built our own cabin.

This time my wife engineered the transfer and we moved from the Twin Cities to Duluth to be nearer our cabin.  But she found more and more things to do in Duluth and has less time to spend in Brimson.  And we’re both getting older and mowing lots of paths and cutting firewood seems to take longer and longer.

We have lots of memories of all those if’s and we know lots more if’s are coming.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
- Robert Frost

Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2016-01-07 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/06/6522_if.

A marvelous description of thought

“It may have been the middle of the night, and Alma may have been asleep only moments earlier, but still her mind was a fearfully well-trained machine of botanical calculation, which is why she instantly heard the abacus beads in her brain begin clicking towards an understanding.”
– “The Signature of All Things” by Elizabeth Gilbert, page 215, hardcover edition

I read too many online newspapers, not enough books on politics, history, and economics, and way too few novels.  My wife on the other hand reads three or more novels a week.  When she finished “The Signature” she suggested that I read it.

It is a fascinating account of a fictional amateur botanist in the 19th who is marveling at how things change over time.

You can read a fascinating interview with the author at http://gardenrant.com/2013/10/elizabeth-gilberts-novel-of-botanical-exploration.html.  It also includes a link to a YouTube video of her.

2904 miles and I can't stop driving

Yesterday we returned from a 12-day trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake ON, West Chester PA, and Silver Spring MD with overnight stops at Sault Ste. Marie MI, Richmond IN, and Madison WI.  That's almost like driving coast-to-coast.  The purpose was a reunion of my wife's sisters and cousins to celebrate our 50th anniversary and that of one of her cousins.

We drank and talked and ate and talked and we walked and we went on a jet boat ride and drank and talked and ate and talked.  We took many pictures and movies and we gave impromptu speeches.  As part of my speech I sang some song fragments with two duets with my wife.  The best part was when my wife's youngest sister, who had had opera training, complimented me on my singing.

We stopped in West Chester to visit a high school and Scout friend and his wife.  Although we took a walk in town and went out to a restaurant, we mostly sat in their gazebo, talked, read, and watched TV.  It was also a bit of a nostalgia trip in that we haven't been in the area since we lived there in 1974-1977.  It is something to drive twisty roads where the trees are right next to the road.

We stopped in Silver Spring to visit a possible third cousin of mine.  Her ancestors were from Baltimore and my great-grandfather gave his father's birthplace as Maryland.  Since John C. Magree was a ship's master born in Baltimore and dismissed from the U.S. Navy in 1862, I suspect he is our common ancestor.  Now to find the right records.  For him they are very sparse: I have found only one transcribed record of his bringing a ship of immigrants from Liverpool to New York.  That was in December 1851.  Since my great-grandfather was born in Brooklyn in December 1850, could John C. Magree have had two families, one in each U.S. port?

It was something to go from the hills of Appalachia to the Great Plains.  In the morning we were going up and down and around and in the afternoon we were driving into the horizon.  I took a picture of one gap and the valley behind us, but I never noted what the rest stop was.  I suppose I could figure it out with the camera time stamp and a map.  As we drove through West Virginia, we certainly understood the feeling of the song, "Country Roads".

I also understood the psychology of "keeping up with traffic".  I've divided drivers into lone wolves, the wolf pack, and law-abiding individuals.

The lone wolves are the drivers who drive fifteen or more miles-per-hour over the speed limit.  They are also the drivers who will weave in and out of traffic to get to an exit one minute before other drivers.  They also arrive in the left lane at about the time another driver is ready to pass a vehicle in the right lane.  That driver has the choice of being tailgated by the lone wolf or slowing down to avoid a collision with the slower vehicle in the right lane.

The wolf pack consists of those who drive five to ten miles over the limit.  It is amusing to watch them drive.  They are in a group of five to ten cars in both lanes.  As they come to a slower vehicle they merge into the left lane, getting closer and closer to each other, sometimes less than a car length apart.  When they get through the "choke point", the first driver will pull right in front of the lead car in the right lane, often at a distance closer than the following car was in the left lane.  Then the second car pulls in front of the first, the third in front of the second, and so on, with a lone wolf bringing up the rear.

The law-abiding drivers are driving within five miles per hour of the posted limit.  They rarely see each other because they are spaced some distance apart.  This gives them the illusion that they are all alone in driving at the speed limit.

When one of these drivers passes a similar driver, the lone wolves and the wolf packs accuse them of holding up traffic.  Isn't it the other way around?  The lone wolves and the wolf packs are pushing traffic.

I think I've had enough of driving for a while.  The one hour to our cabin is enough, and we may be passed only twice, if at all.

Besides, we have to pay all our credit card bills.  Other than all the good visits, the next best thing was that our 2002 Prius got 48.0 miles per gallon in that 2904 miles.