Walk on the random side

“Life is a journey, not a destination” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

This concept can be put into a single word: serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in 1754.  It means finding good things where you weren’t looking for them.  It comes from “The Princes of Serendip”, an Arabian tale.  Serendip was also featured in Prokofiev’s “Love of Three Oranges”.

Ah, this whole column is going to be very serendipitous.  I thought of this column as about the twist and turns of my own life.  But like my life, this column is going to turn up ideas I wasn’t looking for,

The March from the “Love of Three Oranges” by a Soviet composer was, irony of ironies, used as the theme song for the radio program “FBI: In Peace and War”.  One of the FBI’s tasks at the time was finding Communists.  On the other hand, many of Prokofiev’s works were anti-establishment.  Think of “Lieutenant Kije”!

After my parents divorced when I was about five or so, my mother moved in with her aunt and uncle.  Once I started school, I was often free to roam.  I knew all the vacant lots and stores, where the library was, and where a super-duper playground was.

When I was nine, my aunt and uncle bought a house on the other side of town.  I don’t know which came first, a new job or a new house.  Whichever, my mother’s uncle still worked within walking distance.

Again I explored an ever wider area, learning where the movie theater was, a great sledding hill, and the community center and the Y.  I had a take a streetcar to the downtown library.  I made a new set of friends, and eventually joined some of them in a Boy Scout troop.

After my first year of junior high, my mother decided to get her own apartment back on the other side of town.  Again, I had freedom to roam.  No sledding hill, but a vacant lot for baseball and an actual ball diamond a bike ride away.  I also frequented a drug store for malts, ice cream sodas, and sundaes.  That lead me to drop my paper route and work 5-10 after school three times a week.

After I started high school my mother remarried and we moved back across town.  I was supposed to go to a high school with about 3,000 students, but I got district permission to go to the high school where my Scout friends went.  And this road made all the difference.  Would I have gone to Case if I had a different math teacher who didn’t punctuate his remarks with “When you go to Case…”

When still in high school I also decided on my own to go to a Methodist Church within walking distance. I wound up being active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) even into my college years.  This lead to some pressure to go into the ministry.  This and the long daily commute to Case created several conflicts.

While in college I decided to run for the President of the MYF subdistrict.  Also sitting on the subdistrict were a couple of attractive high school girls, both of whom I dated.  But I preferred the second one.  Fifty-six years later, neither of us regrets the choice.  And my wife still doesn’t regret voting against me because she thought MYF was not for college students.

During my tenure on the council I didn’t do so well in my junior at Case.  I was asked not to come back for the spring term.

I don’t remember what led to my choice of Ohio Wesleyan University other than it was Methodist.  Possibly it was my new girlfriend was starting there in the fall.

When I visited OWU before applying, the registrar recommended that I major in mathematics, which I did.  Surprisingly, after my dismal last two semesters at Case, I got all As in math except for a single B.

Prior to graduation I applied to Case for a graduate assistantship in the computer center.  I also applied for an assistantship at the University of Michigan in communications, which included computer science.  I heard from Case right away and was even offered a summer job in the computer center.  I didn’t hear from U of Mich until late July or even early August

When I graduated from OWU we got married and rented the upstairs of a duplex in Cleveland.  This also meant that my wife would have to go to college in the Cleveland area.  She chose Baldwin-Wallace way the other side of the metro area..  Fortunately, she could commute with an instructor who was friend of her mother.  By the way, this friend was also the one who recommended the duplex.

We both liked canoeing and made a few day trips to Portage Lakes.  But our dream was to go to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.  We did so in August 1961.  The trip was a mix of adventure and misadventure.  We didn’t know it at the time, but it changed our lives forever by offering a wide range of unexpected choices.  Many of them were “the least traveled” and “made all the difference.”

That covered about 25 years of my life. I have notes for the next 50 but have run out of space and have other articles lined up for the next few weeks.  If you really, really want more, tell me so when you see me.

Mel thinks he has each day well-planned but something else always arises.

This was also printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2014-09-25 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/09/25/4105_walk_on_the_random_side.

A busy day of trying to do too much

I read the newspaper and it gives me ideas for blog entries. When I write a blog entry I often think of something that needs more clarification. To get more clarification, I search the web for relevant material. I may find something interesting, but that also needs more clarification. The latest find was a chapter of a book. The file had no citation about the larger work or the author. So, I sent email to the webmaster asking for details. I probably won't receive an answer until Monday or Tuesday.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to learn several songs for "Madrigal Dinners". I would like to memorize them but first I have to sing them correctly. For a guy who has been told he has a nice voice, I'm also one who has difficulty staying in key and in time. Plus, I have difficulty grabbing enough air to sing more than two bars on a single breath. And we just remembered we have a practice tonight.

So, you wonder what are "Madrigal Dinners". For the second year, the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Duluth is putting on Madrigal Dinners. These are five course meals supposedly in a renaissance manor with much entertainment. The choir is part of the entertainment.

Can you attend a Madrigal Dinner? I'm glad you asked. For more information see "Winter in Love Madrigal Dinners". Tell them Mel sent you.

Quote of the day – Learning

"Learning isn't a set of things that we know but a world that we enter."
– Adam Gopnik, "Broken Kingdom, Fifty Years of 'The Phantom Tollbooth'", The New Yorker, 2011-10-17

"The Phantom Tollbooth" is a children's book written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer. It has sold over four million copies.

The article itself was a world that I entered by serendipity. I was cleaning my desk and The New Yorker was open to an article about Fukushima. As I closed the magazine, I saw the above article. Now I have to read the next article, "History: The Customer Reviews" by Patricia Pearson.

Little decisions can lead to big changes

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
- Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

There are several science fiction stories about space navigators who can see all the possibilities of a ship's travel and can choose the fastest and safest one. One mistake can lead to disaster.

We lesser mortals can't even predict what effect our choice of lunch may have on our future.

I or my wife had made many little decisions that have had a profound effect on our life, an effect that we could not conceive of at the time.

When I was already in college, I made a decision overnight to run for the presidency of a subdistrict of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I had once declined to do so, but something led me to change my mind. I had a friend nominate me at the meeting the next day, and I won against the listed candidate. Probably because I was male. This was the late 50s.

Once in office, I started dating the elected secretary of the subdistrict. She had voted against me, but after almost 50 years, two children, and three grandchildren, she doesn't regret either decision.

After a couple of years at Univac, I had made an attempt to get a transfer to Norway, but my supervisor didn't follow through on whatever needed to be done. Sometime later, my wife said, "If you still want to go to Europe, don't let us stop you," meaning herself and our kids. So, I made another attempt and we wound up living in Europe for six years.

While we were in Stockholm, my wife struck up a conversation on a subway with another American. We visited each other's houses and were given a standing invitation to visit them in their cabin in Brimson, Minnesota.

When we finally moved back to Minnesota, we spent most of our vacation time in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, but that became less frequent because we never seemed to co-ordinate our vacation time. One year we decided to take up the Brimson invitation over a long weekend. The story is longer yet with other little decisions, but we wound up buying property in Brimson.

Once we had built a cabin on our property, we found that the four-hour drive was becoming tiresome. My wife's employer had an office in Duluth and had been encouraging its employees to work from home whenever possible. So, she asked for a transfer to Duluth.

As usual, there are more little decisions, but one I made was to do more writing. And so here I am, a regular columnist in a local alternative paper and a sometime blogger.

Chaos, noise, and chance can reward the prepared

One of my coffee companions is always trying to put certain group behaviors into some large philosophical context. Some of us think that people are more independent than stereotypes. That is, our lives are governed as much by chance as by some cultural norms. It is chance that often leads to extraordinary happenings.

Today was another ordinary day that was extraordinary. It was ordinary in that I walked to a coffee shop, went to the library, and got a haircut. Well, not quite, I wouldn't ordinarily do the last two this week.

I went to the library to check for a missing book. I had returned a downtown book to the branch library, but the records showed I didn't return it. I was sure I had and couldn't find it in the house or either of our vehicles. Yesterday I double checked the downtown library. Today I checked the branch library, and, lucky me and lucky library, it was shelved in proper Dewey order in the wrong library. This is part of the chaos, a librarian was probably rushed and shelved the downtown book locally.

While looking for the missing book, I saw "The Language Police" by Diane Ravitch. It's about censorship and bowdlerization in the schools. The jacket says it's "a case of the bland leading the bland." I'll have to get this book when I finish those I am currently reading.

I normally wouldn't be getting a haircut this week and I would normally have gotten it earlier, but the barber isn't at my beck and call. Being later allowed me time to go to the library. Because I went to the barber after leaving the coffee shop and library, I returned home on the other side of the street.

I've been thinking of a photo essay on "The ugly side of Duluth", all the streets and sidewalk needing maintenance or repair, the overgrown trees and shrubs blocking the sidewalk, and so on. As I walked by a small green area of UMD, I noticed two pop cans on an otherwise neatly kept area. It was an interesting juxtaposition with all the mushrooms growing because of the recent rains.

Just as I put my camera back in my case, I heard a car honk. I looked up and saw a car braking for a deer running across the road. It was gone in the brush on the other side of the street before I could get my camera out.

As I continued I saw a deer peeping over a hedge in a yard. I got out my camera and managed one picture before it bounded around the house. Then I saw another deer on the other side of the yard. I kept taking pictures as fast as I could and got one very clear one with the deer trotting towards the back yard. As I was trying for a few more, I noticed that the camera would no longer zoom. I had pushed the off button instead of the shutter. More chaos.

Thatcher's law has been proved again: "The unexpected happens; you had better prepare for it."

See also my two identically titled articles, One thing leads to another (Aug. 4, 2005) and One thing leads to another (Nov. 10, 2005)