November 22, 2011
The biggest news events of my school days were the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Neil Armstrong’s hop onto the moon in 1969. Like me, my friends at the time surely remember where we were and what we were doing when tragedy struck 48 years ago today, and when America’s triumph six years later transfixed the world. I can still see my girlfriend sobbing in the hallway at our junior high school when news of Kennedy’s death arrived. Six years later, gathered in front of a TV at a friend’s house, a group of us razzed another friend for drinking too much beer as crackling radio transmissions from the lunar module described a tense descent but safe landing. Someone joked that our tipsy friend was unpatriotic, which hurt his feelings, which set off even more jokes at his expense. I don’t recall whether we appreciated that Armstrong’s first step in moon dust fulfilled the momentous challenge Kennedy had given the nation in 1962: reach the moon by the end of the decade. For certain we had no inkling that while basking in the astronauts’ achievement 238,855 miles from home, America would never again feel as good about itself.
November 12, 2011
For decades a thought arrived often and too pushy to ignore: I had a purpose in life not of my choosing. Without warning I would have an instant to save a stranger’s life. The chance was destiny. Imagined scenarios would flash past, chief among them rescuing a drowning child. Maybe the idea emerged from a childhood immersed in water and lost in the fictional worlds of Tarzan, Tom Swift, and The Hardy Boys.
In adulthood this destiny became an unplayed ace-in-the-hole to erase disappointments and atone for mistakes. Until this week the idea had vanished, a victim of age perhaps. But the shocking news at Penn State left me wondering whether nothing has changed, and I need to be ready. I don’t want to fail like assistant football coach Mike McQueary, who stumbled upon the rape of a prepubescent boy in the locker room showers in 2002. He has been vilified for not stopping the alleged rapist, the team’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky. Instead McQueary testified that he hurried away and contacted his father, who advised him to inform head coach Joe Paterno. McQueary did so but the police were never told, and Sandusky went on to sexually abuse other boys for as many as seven years, according to a grand jury report.
I’ve tried to imagine McQueary, a former Penn State quarterback, looking back at that horrifying moment and reacting as he did. Has a day or even an hour passed in which he hasn’t agonized over a mistake that led to so much suffering? What McQueary failed to do brands him forever and blots out qualities that earned him admiration from players he has coached. For better or worse, we’re all like McQueary was just before he saw a terrible crime in progress, candidates awaiting a test, a test that will change everything.
My previous post, inspired by Steve Jobs’ last words, explored what happens when we die. But what about the here and now and the unknowable number of days ahead of us? Jobs himself used the certainty of death as a motivator and guide for how to live every day. In his much-praised commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, the late Apple CEO said:
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
I thought of Jobs’ speech today while trying to comprehend calculations that identify the odds we exist and thus have the opportunity to follow our hearts. The odds are so mind-blowingly large, according to the man who did the math, that our existence is a miracle. Dr. Ali Binazir defines a miracle as an event so unlikely that it’s almost impossible. The betting line: 1 in 102,685,000. Our brains aren’t equipped to grasp the magnitude of that number — way too many zeros, so Binazir gives an example to illustrate the miracle odds:
So what’s the probability of your existing? It’s the probability of 2 million people getting together – about the population of San Diego – each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice, and they all come up the exact same number say, 550,343,279,001.
How Binazir calculated the odds is visually explained in an infographic that a science editor says will make you more skeptical that you exist at all. Assuming that we do, how should we respond to our improbability? Binazir says:
Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.
And what are the odds that we will?
November 6, 2011
Two recent stories of love and death feel connected. This is absurd considering that 1,500 years and 5,000 miles separate them. But why let facts get in the way of a feeling, a yearning? Last month an Iowa couple married for 72 years died an hour apart while holding hands. The wife died first but the hospital heart-rate monitor kept showing she had a pulse. The equipment was detecting her husband’s heart through their clasped hands. Then came news last week of an archeological find in Italy: two skeletons buried in the 5th or 6th centuries while holding hands. How can there be a connection beyond hands held and the bond of enduring love they signify?
The stories reminded me of a column, “Einstein’s God” that suggests the possibility of something I want to believe: the two couples are one in the same. When Albert Einstein learned of the death of a physicist friend, he wrote to the friend’s family:
He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.â€
When I live vicariously through someone, it usually involves imagining a pleasurable or adventurous event. Now I’m experiencing the opposite, imagining the terror of friends waking at night in their burning house. That’s terrifying enough, but add to the plot a baby and arson. The couple and their five-month-old son, asleep on the top floor, might have never awoken. The mother, a light sleeper, smelled smoke about 3:30 a.m. She thought she hadn’t turned off the stove. They found the first floor filled with smoke. Someone had ignited the exterior basement door, and the flames had burned through the door and were spreading.
Mom, dad, and son escaped unharmed but I insist on seeing tragic endings. Them trapped and overcome by smoke. Them crashing through their bedroom window and falling into the night. My mind segues to same situation but different setting: my home, my family.
Our friends have installed six smoke detectors. I’ve checked ours. The arsonist is still on the loose. The here and now is not vicarious.
A few years ago I wrote here about a work colleague who disclosed that he had a chimpanzee. I remembered his disclosure while reading about a chimp ripping off a Connecticut woman’s hands and much of her face. Now comes news that the woman has undergone a successful face transplant, the tenth such surgery in the world. The odds are minute that Charla Nash will cross paths with someone who knew the donor, but as these remarkable surgeries become commonplace, such encounters are inevitable. Not that a person’s face fitted over the bones — and personality — of another produces an exact duplicate. Still, the emotional response will be different than when spotting someone who looks like, even in a small way, a deceased loved one. Several times I’ve seen women who remind me of my mother, bittersweet coincidences for sure. Imagine the reaction if I saw her unmistakable face, alive and animated long after her death? And what if I saw her looking at me?
News about the discovery of two mostly intact skeletons from nearly 2 million years ago focuses on claims that they represent a previously unknown branch in the human evolutionary tree. I appreciate the potential significance of Australopithecus sediba, as the middle-age woman and adolescent boy have been dubbed. But my focus keeps drifting to questions whose answers, forever out of reach, would never make news.
What made the pair, possibly mother and son, fall into a South African sinkhole littered with bones of saber-tooth tigers and other animals? With brains one-quarter the size of ours or less, what hopes and dreams did they — or could they — harbor? If they experienced terror before their fatal fall, was it fear any different than our own? Too bad archeologists can’t unearth thoughts and feelings along with tangible evidence like bones.
This much is certain: in dying many millennia ago, this woman and boy with human and ape-like features may have secured a lofty spot in history, an accidental achievement as incomprehensible to them as the universe is to us. So why care? Despite long odds, our lives might find purpose long after they end.
Stumbling upon intersecting observations by two writers today, I was reminded of a vacation several years ago at the Olympic Peninsula’s northwestern tip. I was drinking coffee in the lobby of a lodge. A new guest was checking in. The innkeeper, making small talk, asked what he did for a living. “I work for Duke Energy in North Carolina,” the man answered. With barely a pause he added, as if reading from his business card, “And global warming has nothing to do with carbon emissions.” I regret not asking him what that day’s crystalline sky would have looked like if CO2 was pink instead of invisible.
The writers who triggered that memory are Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, whose 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, slapped me awake to what we’re doing to the planet. The second is by Marilynne Robinson, the acclaimed novelist whose new work of non-fiction, Absence of Mind, tackles science, religion, and human consciousness. Read More
The last European survivor of World War I has died at age 111. Harry Patch’s late-life interviews are cautionary. Reading this story, I’m struck by a glaring hole: unmentioned is why nations sent millions to be slaughtered. A close friend of Patch said the veteran stressed two messages: “Remember with gratitude and respect those who served on all sides, (and) settle disputes by discussion, not war.”
Reading about this descent into sexting hell reminds of simpler times. Never thought I’d get nostalgic for mooning, the worst offense involving nakedness from my school days.
One of my younger brothers was suspended for a week from junior high for flashing his bare butt at a girl during phys ed class. He claimed she had mouthed off. My mother, a secretary at the school, was mortified. Long after the transgression she kept carrying on about the “shame of it all.”
If there had been YouTube and cell phones with video cameras, I no doubt could watch the event all these decades later, along with the rest of the world. Then again some things are better consigned to imagination.
The ‘hood has changed after a week of violent crime only a short walk from my Northeast Portland house.
Count them: two stabbings in two gang fights at the Lloyd Center Mall, another gang fight at the Applebee’s restaurant across the street from the mall, a bank robbery, and a gang-related shooting at an Asian restaurant-bar four blocks south of me. The victim survived four gunshot wounds. Read More
News of the chimpanzee nearly killing a woman in Connecticut delivered a memory. About fifteen years ago, during chitchat before a late-starting meeting, a colleague at a Florida newspaper mentioned that an elderly chimp lived with him. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then this man, friendly but blandly reserved, came to life as I questioned him about his companion. Read More
The letter made me feel good. Pacific Power reported that our household bought enough renewable energy in 2008 to prevent the release of 19,890 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the air. That’s the same as not driving 20,170 miles. We paid $125 more for electricity to participate in the utility’s Blue Sky program. But the letter’s effect soon faded. Read More
