Play! Prescription for the puritan soul

Like many introverts, I take life pretty seriously.  What I do must be purposeful, practical, productive.

Or so my inner critic likes to remind me.

It’s only now that I’m “of a certain age” I realize life’s way too short not to play.  So in recent years I’ve joined Toastmasters, taken up swing dancing, learned to yodel, tried my hand at improv comedy, beefed up my blues guitar chops, and in general decided it’s OK to enjoy making a fool of myself.

This morning, thanks to a comment from Scatterbrain who blogs at Splodge-plog.com, I found a link to an article about the SF Regional Air Guitar contest that took place last week.

Talk about purposeless play! You have to watch the video (the larger image, please) of the winner Alex Koll (stage name: Awesome Shred Begley, Jr.) explaining and demonstrating his extraordinary talents at Air Guitar.

Now this guy puts his heart and soul, body and hair into PLAY!

Pat Patterson: a torrid teen tale

The June I graduated from junior high was hot and steamy, as only New England weather can be. It was also hot and steamy in my adolescent heart as I contemplated the social possibilities ahead of me once I got to high school.

In my town, junior high took you all the way through 9^th grade. It was a social wasteland for a girl. My male classmates were short, their voices cracked like yodeling gone awry, and they were clueless about dating.

To celebrate our exit from junior high one of my friends hosted a party and invited some friends of her older brother. These high school boys were as anxious to meet us as we were to meet them because their female classmates had just deserted them in favor of the young college boys who had come home for the summer.

At the party I quickly set my radar on a guy who was nearly six feet tall– blonde, blue-eyed and adorable. “That’s Pat Patterson,” my friend whispered to me, “he’s on the football team and very popular.”

I was thrilled when he asked me to dance several times during the evening. Even more thrilled when he asked me to the movies the next night.

He walked me home after the movie and kissed me goodnight at the door. Wow! I was in love.  I knew we’d be engaged in no time.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. I was leaving the next morning for an 8-week girls camp in Maine, where I was a counselor-in-training. Pat and I exchanged addresses and promised to write each other.

In my hyperactive imagination my romance with Pat grew more intense the longer I was away. I relived our dances over and over. And the movie. And that kiss! I poured my fantasies onto the pages of my diary.

He wrote me only once – a letter I kept under my pillow and kissed every night. I wrote him every week.

Shortly before camp ended I wrote him one last letter telling him EXACTLY when I’d be getting home: Wednesday, August 26 on the 4 o’clock train.

The first thing I asked my parents when they met me at the station was, “Did Pat call?”

“No…”

Wednesday night passed. No call.

Thursday night. No call (back then girls did NOT call boys).

Friday night came, the first night of the weekend when EVERY self-respecting teen goes out. Still no call. I was miserable. To make matters worse, we were having a torrid sticky heat wave and our house had no air conditioning.

By Saturday night I was so distraught that I couldn’t even eat my dinner. When my dad asked if something was wrong, I burst into tears: “EVERYTHING!” and stormed from the table. I ran into my bedroom, slammed the door HARD, and threw myself on the bed sobbing.

About 7 o’clock I heard the phone ring downstairs. I ran to my bedroom door and it was STUCK, swollen from the humidity. Nobody appeared to be answering the phone. I screamed hysterically, “SOMEONE PLEASE ANSWER THE PHONE!!!”

My mother finally got it and yelled up the stairs,“It’s for you.”

“Who is it?” I demanded.

“I think he said it was Pat,” she said.

But I still could NOT get my door unstuck. I wailed pathetically…“Pleease… will someone help me get out??”

My dad finally worked it open and I raced to the phone, trying to compose myself.  “Uh, hi,” I said, as if I were totally bored with pesky boys calling so much.

“Hey, glad you’re back,” the voice on the other end said. “Want to catch the 8 o’clock show?”

I paused… just long enough to make it seem like I had other options. “Well… ok.”

“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” he said.

I looked in the mirror. My hair was matted with tears. My eyes were red and puffy. I had a lot of face repair to do in that half hour.

At 7:30 on the dot the doorbell rang and I bounded downstairs to get it.

I opened the door and there was my short, geeky, pimply classmate from next door, Matt Harmon.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked.

“Go where?”

“The movies…

“I can’t. I already have a date with Pat Patterson.” I said.

“But I just talked to you a few minutes ago and you said you’d be ready.”

By this time my mother was standing right behind me and I knew I was stuck. The only thing that could have made it worse was to be seen with Matt by someone I knew.

Turned out that callow Pat Patterson had been dating another girl most of the summer.

At my 25^th high school reunion I learned that as an adult Pat hadn’t amounted to much. Matt Harmon, however, had become a very successful attorney. He had also become tall, charming and acne-free. If I’d stuck with him I’d now be living in a Manhattan penthouse during the week and spending the weekends at an elegant cottage in the Hamptons. Who knew?

Piles of possessions: George Carlin on “Stuff”

Inspire yourself to clear clutter with a comedy act from the late great George Carlin. Watch his routine on “Stuff” and see yourself reflected.

I love this line:”A house is just a cover for your piles of stuff !”

To be a Paige: place and people of kin

I am a member of a family that has coalesced around one name, Paige. No matter that many of us were born with non-Paige surnames – we all consider ourselves Paiges. (We’re like the Kennedys — except for the Irish Catholic part, the political dynasty part, the dogged-by-tragedy part… oh, and the money. If you’re a Joe Kennedy descendant you’re a Kennedy, even if your name is something like Schriver.)

Right now I’m paying my annual pilgrimage to our family home, Pine Haven, on Cape Cod. My great-grandfather Timothy Paige bought Pine Haven in 1911 as a summer home when he came into some money from his uncle who had earned a bundle during the California Gold Rush selling pickaxes to the miners. Tim and the other Paiges had been farmers in central Massachusetts (Hardwick) for generations, so the inheritance was quite a shock.

Pine Haven -Paige haven since 1911

Some of the money went for infrastructure in the village of Hardwick and some was spent on Pine Haven, the house next door to it and the house across the street. Pine Haven’s current owners are my second cousin Patty, who was born a Paige, and her husband. The house across the street also remains in the family and other cousins have bought or built homes within a block or two, so you could almost say we have a family compound – although it’s hardly grand.

Patty has taken it upon herself to organize family reunions every few years. We come from all across the country to participate and celebrate our Paigeness. We make a day trip to Hardwick to see the Paige Library, the Paige pew in the Universalist church, the modest Paige Agricultural Center, the statue of gold-rusher Calvin Paige.

Paige Library, Hardwick MA

About ten years ago Patty’s husband instituted a suitably fake-solemn ceremony when their daughter Paige married. With a ribbon, certificate and pompous pronouncement, he inducted the groom into the “I married a Paige” clan. Since then, whenever a member of the extended Paige family marries, their spouse is inducted at the reception, witnessed by growing numbers of the in-law clan, and cheered on by the “birth” Paiges.

So here’s the question: why am I a Paige, and not a Kimball, Bachrach or Keyes? Although my dad’s mom was the Paige, I carry equal shares of genetic material from my other three grandparents. I’m just a quarter-blood Paige by that reckoning.

But if my grandpa had been the Paige instead of my grandma, my Dad would have carried the name as a full Paige and I’d be a half-blood. If I was my dad’s son my name would still be Paige and I could also consider myself full-blood.

At each generation, the blood of one family line is diluted by each new family into which the children marry. Over time the dilution of a particular family’s genes could be considered only homeopathic in strength. And yet, if the family has sons at each generation who pass the family surname to their sons, the name continues at full strength, no matter how many generations have passed.

When does a bloodline begin then? Who is the most essential Paige, or Smith, Jones, Epstein, Kennedy?

Why am I a Paige? Because we say so. Because the Kimballs, Bachrachs, and Keyes never got their familyness acts together the way the Paiges did.

The regular gatherings of the clan and sub-groups of the clan reinforce our Paigeness. Patty’s collection of Paige photos going back more than 100 years and her unstinting hospitality to family members reinforce our Paigeness. The wedding ritual certainly celebrates Paigeness. And finally, we are blessed with a connection to Place. Pine Haven is the place we’ve been coming to for a hundred years, and there are more of us across the street and down the road. We can also go back to a village in central Massachusetts and see our name on various plaques on buildings, headstones in the graveyard.

We are literally grounded, and in today’s quickly changing world I find this solidity comforting.

Purple prose prizewinner: the Bulwer-Lytton contest

The Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest is sponsored by San Jose State University, with the goal of finding someone who can write as bad a first paragraph as Edward George Bulwer-Lytton did in 1830 with the opener to “Paul Clifford.”

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

They get thousands and thousands of entries each year, many of which are positively brilliant pieces of writing, in the over-the-top style demanded by the assignment. I’m serious.

Take this, the winning paragraph from a couple years back from computer analyst Dan McKay:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in Chapter 7 of the shop manual.

Take about colorful writing! E.B. White would have applauded the extended metaphor, the specificity of the details, the action verbs, the images that pop off the page.

The 2008 contest winner will be announced in the next couple of weeks and I’ll keep you posted.

Poet’s prescience: pleasure takes a vacation

Prescience: foreknowledge of events

The poet Billy Collins has a droll sense of humor and often mirrors the pulse of the people. He wrote “Consolation” several years ago when America was flush, gas was cheap, and the dollar was strong against the euro.

Now he seems prescient. We don’t know why he didn’t travel to Italy that year, but we know why we‘re not going to Italy. We’re poor, fuel and fares are costly, and the dollar is in the doldrums. So enjoy:

Consolation by Billy Collins (enjoy him reading it on YouTube)

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Pills as panacea

Panacea: a remedy for all ailments or difficulties from the Greek

In the paper today was an article about the major decline in the past ten years of patients visiting shrinks for talk therapy. Instead they are being prescribed pills for whatever bothers them.

Why this change? Because the insurance industry pays for pills - with just enough talk that the shrink can decide whether the pink or green or yellow pill would be best.

This is fine if your problem is biochemical. Some are. But if you’re struggling with your temper, your spouse, issues left over from a painful childhood, existential desire for meaning, etc etc etc (you name it, stuff bothers us) a pill will not do the trick.

Once more we’re prescribing bandaids, where a “get to the root of it approach” (public health philosophy) might well be more appropriate.

We are so stuck on the instant bottom line!!

Pausch passes: sense of humor intact

I wrote about Randy Pausch last week, but at that time I didn’t know the specifics about his death. I just knew he was a Unitarian Universalist. UUs are all about making THIS life THE life. Doing what needs to be done to make the world a better place - because living is about contributing, not about being saved in a future life (heaven?).  That was Dr. Pausch.

May we all be as joyful and skillful as he was at contributing. He sets a high bar.

Evidently he died with the same grace he with which lived. And with his sense of humor intact. From the NYTimes:

It probably comes as no surprise that the final words uttered by Dr. Pausch before his death last Friday from pancreatic cancer reflected the same humor and good nature that made him an Internet celebrity.

Last night, ABC aired a tribute to Dr. Pausch, replaying a Diane Sawyer special about his life and experiences that first aired in the spring. The segment also included new interviews with his close friend Steve Seabolt, who was with Randy during his final moments and noted that his “trademark wit and intellect were intact.’’

Mr. Seabolt only shared a few moments with viewers, noting that even near death, Dr. Pausch’s sense of humor remained. He said Dr. Pausch talked about how glad he was that he was home and his family and friend were close, and laughed, saying, “I just feel so bad about the dying part.”

Mr. Seabolt also relayed a conversation he had with Dr. Pausch’s 6-year-old son, Dylan. They were talking about cancer and he told the boy that “some problems can’t be solved, or they can’t be solved yet.’’

Dylan responded, “My daddy has taught me that every problem can be solved, and that I should believe that every problem can be solved, and that I’m strong enough and smart enough that I should never let a problem get in my way.”

At the end, as Dr. Pausch’s body was clearly failing, Mr. Seabolt said he told his friend, “It’s important for you to feel like you can let go. It’s okay.”

Dr. Pausch’s reply: “I’ll get back to you on that.’’

And those, according to Mr. Seabolt, were the final words of Randy Pausch.

Poking around a little more I came upon this further piece of wisdom from Pausch’s UU minister in Pittsburgh, quoted in an article by his book collaborator, Jeffrey Zaslow:

Early on, he had vowed to do the logistical things necessary to ease his family’s path into a life without him. His minister helped him think beyond estate planning and funeral arrangements. “You have life insurance, right?” the minister asked.

“Yes, it’s all in place,” Randy told him.

“Well, you also need emotional insurance,” the minister explained. The premiums for that insurance would be paid for with Randy’s time, not his money. The minister suggested that Randy spend hours making videotapes of himself with the kids. Years from now, they will be able to see how easily they touched each other and laughed together.

And he did just that.

Preposterous profits: Exxon Mobil eats your lunch

Exxon Mobil posted the fattest operating profit in in US corporate history yesterday - $11.7 billion for the second quarter. Up from last year, and from the year before. While the company insists it’s trying to bring down gas prices, the money they spend on exploration ($7 billion) pales compared to what they’ve spent in recent years on stock buybacks ($8 billion) and dividends. (from an AP story)

Company profits were $40.61 billion in 2007.

They want more drilling rights, offshore and ANWAR, when they don’t even use a whole lot of the rights they already have.

In 2007 CEO Rex Tillerson took home a pay package that included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36 million bonus, and $16.1 million of stock and option awards, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received nearly $430,000 of other compensation, including $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the company aircraft.

I wonder if they’ll up his travel allowance to cover higher fuel costs… poor baby. I suppose every time he fills the tank he makes a little more profit, so what does he care?

Occidental Petroleum Corp CEO Ray Irani made $33.6 million and Anadarko Petroleum Corp chief James Hackett took in $26.7 million in 2007 - even more than Tillerson.

Priestess, Pastor, Pope, Preacher, Prophet?

Last weekend I performed my fifth wedding ceremony as a minister of the Universal Life Church. I love doing these ceremonies: it’s a blending of some of my best skills: public speaker, workshop leader, Unitarian worship leader. It’s also in my genes.

My dad was a Justice of the Peace in Connecticut - and his all-time favorite task was performing weddings. My mom, my sisters and I were often called in to be witnesses because he often did the service at our house. When he died in 1994, the headline on the front page of the local paper said, “Fred Kimball dies: famed for 700 marriages.”  This would have totally cracked him up. (He and my mom were married 56 years.)

So far I’ve done a pagan handfasting ceremony, a “surprise” wedding where the guests didn’t realize what was about to happen, a wedding on a boat, and a couple of non-denominational ones. I’ve also officiated at a memorial service… whew.

I’ve been ordained by ULC since 1992 (it’s free online) but just realized I could go so much further… for a contribution of just $10.95 I can choose a reverential honorific from the following list at the ULC headquarters:

Abbe, Reverend of Rock ‘n Roll, Abbess, Abbot, Ananda, Angel, Apostle of Humility, Apostolic Scribe, Arch Deacon, Arch Priest, Archbishop, Arch cardinal, Ascetic Gnostic, Bible Historian, Bishop, Brahman, Brother, Canon, Cantor, Cardinal, Channel, Chaplain, Colonel, Cure, Deacon, Dervish, Directress, Disciple, Druid, Elder, Faith Healer, Evangelist, Emissary, Father, Field Missionary, Flying Missionary, Free Thinker, Friar, Goddess, Guru, Hadji, Healing Minister, High Priest, High Priestess, Imam, Lama, Lay Sister, Magus, Martyr, Messenger, Metropolitan, Minister of Music, Minister of Peace, Missionary, Missionary Doctor, Missionary Healer, Missionary of Music, Missionary Priest, Monk, Monsignor, Most Reverend, Mystical Philosopher, Orthodox Monk, Parochial Educator, Pastor General, Patriarch, Peace Counselor, Preacher, Preceptor, Priest, Priestess, Prophet, Rector, Rabbi, Religious Preacher, Revelator, Reverend, Reverend Father, Reverend Mother, Right Reverend, Saintly Healer, Scribe, Seer, Shaman, Soul Therapist, Sister, Spiritual Counselor, Spiritual Warrior, Starets, Swami, Teller, Thanatologist, The Very Esteemed, Universal Rabbi, Universal Religious Philosopher, Vicar, Universal Philosopher of Absolute Reality, Wizard, Gothi, Gythia, Psychic Healer, Minister of Rock ‘n Roll, Rock ‘n Roll Missionary, Rock Doctor (R.D), Rock ‘n Roll Minister, Child of the Universe, Prince, Spiritual Healer, Saint, Pope

I especially like Saint Joy, but my friends and family would cough, sputter, choke and gasp if I tried it.