Home. Work. Homework. Work@Home.

I’ve been working from home for a long time now; twenty years or more. When I held a staff position, I often worked from home when deadlines and the general craziness of a large organization intruded into my worktime. It took a bit of discipline at first, setting goals and reaching them, rewarding myself with a cup of coffee or even lunch or dinner (I’m not a “snacker”). I valued those times when I could justify leaving my office, letting the rest of the staff do what they had to do, and focus completely on one project. Of course there would be interruptions: questions from my staff, calls from the person I worked for, anything that had to be dealt with “now.” But for the most part my office left me alone.

Like most people who work at home (part-time or full-time), I accomplished more, but I also worked longer hours. That seems to be the case with most people today who telecommute, and while most of us who do that sort of thing won’t admit it, there is a part of the workday we miss. You can e-mail your colleagues, or even pick up the phone, but if you are like me, when I get on the phone my first thought is to get off as quickly as I can. There is something about talking to a piece of plastic that doesn’t encourage real dialogue. I want to see you, but I also want to experience subconsciously, your breathing, your warmth, whatever scent you may exude. I want to know, when you get right down to it, that you are alive, living, breathing, and that I am alive as well. It’s no small thing, is it, to know you are in the presence of another human being?

Since I have come to live in a remote and underpopulated part of the world, except for an occasional face-to-face meeting with a client, or my more regular meetings with a group of other writers, I work alone, for myself, in a small office in the house. I still begin my day early, get out with my dog, then eat breakfast and “go to the office.” As quickly as I can, I dispose of incoming mail, check the headlines (I get a lot of ideas from them), and then begin work on whatever I left unfinished the day before. Today I’m focused on this essay, but when it is ready to go, I’ll turn to stories or other projects that I have committed to (to myself, if not to a client).

A writer never really stops writing or working on stories or ideas, but I don’t work full-time any more. Mornings are for things I do in my head. Afternoons are for physical things: maintenance of equipment, wood cutting for the furnace, necessary trips to town, jobs that occupy my hands more than my head. Reading time begins usually around nine or ten. My days are full every day, seven days a week. Yet there is something missing.

I call it “water-cooler time,” but you know what I mean: in college it was called a bull session, but it’s the same thing, no matter where you are: conversation that, although it may seem to be meaningless or just “bull,” is really a way to sort out your ideas, get responses to things you are thinking about, and even hear something that starts a new line of thinking in your own mind. Ideas come from that sort of thing, which is why some companies are now taking a second look at telecommuting. To remain competitive today takes more than people typing away in a cubicle. It is that interaction of ideas, coming at times from unlikely sources, a kind of conflict creativity perhaps, that leads to everything from identification of problems to original and successful solutions.

A water-cooler for one just doesn’t do it.

On the Cutting Edge

This is the story of a knife. It has three blades, and the sides of the handle are simulated bone. It has been around a long time. “Old Timer” is the name pressed into a small metal block on either side. It attached itself to me years ago, when a friend  and I were fishing one of the local rivers. It was lying on a rock along the bank, when I saw it, picked it up and put it in my pocket.

For a few years it remained on top of the chest-of-drawers in my closet. I had other, smaller pocket knives, some with more blades and a few very small ones with tiny tools like scissors, or a screwdriver. I had a Swiss Army Knife™, but it completed its service commitment and retired. I have a multitool Leatherman™ that came to work for me after that. I have some larger, sharper, more aggressive knives, including one my father had for many years. A few in my collection are small ones given away by various companies over the years. Back in time, these small knives were called pen-knives or stamp-knives and were used to trim quills or cut stamps (before the post office started perforating them).

When I started carrying the “old timer” a few years ago, it made the terms of our association very clear: from time-to-time it would step out on its own, do whatever an old knife does when it’s alone, and then come back. Saturday night, leaving a friend’s house, I pulled my car keys out of my pocket and, probably at the same time, the “Old Timer” saw its opportunity to escape. It must have decided it need some time off.

At home, emptying my pockets, I realized it was missing. I checked the car, then recalled that I had used it to cut the seal on a wine bottle at our friends’ house. Perhaps I had left it on the counter, I thought. The next day I called and asked if it was safely in their hands, but the answer was “no.”

On Monday morning our friend called to say that it had been found in the yard, near where we had parked. I know that it will remain with me for whatever time it feels is right, before going off again. I wonder if it is seeking its original owner. I wonder how many pockets it has resided in other than mine. I hope it will remain with me a long time. I’ve carried a knife of some sort probably since I was seven or eight, and I feel incomplete without one either in my pocket or on my belt. It’s a small thing, but perhaps it represents the boy in me.

We are both old-timers now.

Wet Land and People Not Dry Behind the Ears

It was a disappointing weekend. The weather was fine, warm and sunny, telling us that Spring is almost here. The birds are learning again that they can have a better balanced diet if they feed beyond the feeders we have on the decks; that worms and grubs and other tiny live things are tasty and nutritious. It is the time when the nuts are out, so to speak. Which is what makes it somewhat disappointing. A few of them have fallen on our fields.

This time of year, after the winter rains and snows have mostly soaked into the ground, our north field remains somewhat like a rice paddy. The underground springs suddenly remember that they can penetrate from below, and much of that field is under water, soft and delicate. So much so that the natural fertilizer we spread can’t be put out yet. It’s always a race between the field being dry enough to work, and the hay growing too tall to get over it.

That’s what caused us such disappointment this weekend. I have a neighbor (whom I’ve never met), who has a nice weekend retreat on a piece of land I sold some years ago. I’ve seen the owner once, from the field when he stopped to unlock his gate. We waved but didn’t speak. That was a year or so ago. Late on Saturday, we became aware of what sounded like a pickup truck on the road that cuts through our land and goes on up the valley. After an hour or so of hearing the same noise, I went out on the deck that faces the fields, to see if the traffic was simply lookers coming to check out the deer that gather in the fields after sunset. It wasn’t near dark yet, and imagine my surprise when I stood on the deck and heard and saw someone on a 4-wheeler (the most ubiquitous toy you find in the country) in our field, riding around our pond, yelling and having a good ole’ time. By the time I put on boots, walked to where the Bronco was parked, pulled it out and drove down to the field, the perps were away, but telltale tire tracks crossed the road from our field to the driveway of my un-met neighbor. The gate was open, so I drove on up to the cabin.

I spoke to a young woman (rather reserved I thought, until she shared with me that I didn’t have to speak to her in the manner I had chosen because “We’re college educated,”). She seemed to think that whatever they might have done, they did in the innocent belief that the field was open to anyone who wanted to use it. I explained that despite her college education, she and her friends had caused considerable damage to my hay field and possibly the pond. I was assured that any costs would be met to restore the field. Well, that’s not so easy to do, and I have no idea of the cost, but I think it might be several thousand dollars. I left after assuring her that the next visitor would be from the sheriff’s office.

This morning, about 7:30, Teddy Dog and I went down to the field to look at and photograph the damage. There, around the pond, were wheel tracks deep into the land atop the dam, in the field in front of the dam, and about mid-way up the field, even more, deeper tracks. Obviously these college educated elite had not learned that when you drive a wheel through water over soil, it makes a nice little channel. Or maybe that’s what they wanted to see and study. But they must also have missed the classes on civility and civic responsibility, as well as how to live with neighbors, the meaning of trespass, and the fact that there are laws against it.

The field can be fixed (at some expense). That isn’t what bothers me. What disturbs me, what takes away from the enjoyment of the blossoming Spring, is what is left out. That people (of any age beyond puberty) can wantonly destroy what is obviously a fragile piece of land just for the hell of it, and not their own land at that. What is the pleasure factor here? Cheating a landowner? Proving you can drive in a circle and splash a lot of mud here and there? What has happened to our civilization when young adults are so cavalier about property and respect and appreciation of nature? Why would you want to come to the country for the weekend if you don’t like what it is all about? Yes, I’m disappointed that I will have a smaller hay crop this year, and yes I am saddened that the fragile ecology of that acreage is threatened. All of those things bother me. But there is so much more here: disregard for the health of the land, disdain for property rights, delight in destruction. I don’t want to put up fences and gates and more signs that warn against trespass, but at the same time, I don’t want to have to live with the consequences of someone else’s disregard for what is right and civilized behavior.

Life is too short to spend it angry.

Tools of the Trade. Really.

For many years I have kept a journal (as opposed to a diary) in which I write things of greater moment (to me) than what I did or didn’t do today or yesterday. Most of my journaling has been in standard school composition books, although sometimes I have used smaller pocket-size notebooks or books designed for journaling. I have a travel journal, for instance, that I use when I am away from home. It was a gift from the one with whom I have traveled through life, on our first long trip out west, and I have reserved it for those times I am on the road, either with her or alone.

Recently I received a different format popular in Japan, that is smaller than I am used to, and is one continuous piece of paper, folded like an accordion to make a compact, connected whole. I’ve nearly filled one side, and will soon need to begin again with either the other side or a new book. I will probably go back to my favored composition book format. The small pages of the accordion don’t seem to give me the feeling of space that I like to fill. I imagine that a person who lives in a small country, where concepts and practices related to privacy and use of space are different, would learn an economy of words that befit a small book, but I’m a little too far along to change, I think. The format does lend itself to a kind of sketchbook, so I may use the rest of it for that.

Writers are especially particular about the tools we use. For years I wrote my first drafts on yellow legal pads, using red ballpoint pens. In those years the pens were much longer, about the diameter of a pencil, and almost as costly as a fountain pen. Today, unless you care about the tools you use, ballpoints are almost always available free. I still use them, but I like the “elderpen” version as a matter of choice. These fat and often soft-bodied instruments are easier for fingers cramped by constant engagement with thin pens and pencils.

I seldom commit a draft with pen anymore. I learned touch typing in high school, and still consider it the most valuable skill I learned there. I have gone through old uprights , as office size machines were known, portables and electrics, to dedicated word processors and desk tops to what I now consider my first tool of choice, a wide-screen laptop with a keyboard as wide as any typewriter I ever owned. Because I began when typewriters were still purely mechanical, I learned to hit the keys hard. When I’m really moving along, or when what I’m writing is drawing on my emotions, I tend to pound. I’ve broken keyboards in earlier computers, but my present one seems “combat hardened” and has given me no indication that I abuse it.

My journals, for the most part, are still hand-written. Fiction or fact, film or paper, demand a lot of thinking and planning before the words form. A journal is more a stream of consciousness exercise where one may pick apart more raw emotion and reaction. A pen, I think, provides an  almost a direct flow from writing to reading.

I still use a red pen sometimes, but that is too much like seeing myself bleed.

Tools You Can Use

I’m a tool collector. My favorite category is words. I love words, in fact I prefer to use them more than any other tool set I own. I have books of obscure words and collections of quotations and aphorisms and dictionaries and programs that define and even translate expressions, slang and word origins. All of those are tools I can use. I prefer, however, to keep my special collections for inspiration and the pure pleasure of discovery and understanding.

The tools I use most are everyday words, in ways that help me tell stories that readers can understand and appreciate. When I’m reading, and have to stop and reach for one of my chair-side dictionaries, the author has lost me at least for a few minutes, and sometimes that loss is permanent. Writing, at least for me, is a way of sharing something I feel or understand or find mystifying, but if I cannot communicate that to a reader or listener or viewer, then I have failed at what I do.

Sometimes though, I use those tools to absolutely confuse or distract. Even when I was very young, I would try to defuse or deflect an antagonist with words. Sometimes it worked, and at others I would eventually have to resort to physical means to escape from a bad situation. Being taller than most of my peers, and skinnier than a beanpole, I somehow seemed to be a target for playground bullies, but overall, I didn’t have too many fights or bad times. When I did have to fight, my long arms would give me an advantage, and eventually the one trying to beat up on me would give up and go find another target. Still, I persisted in using words to defend myself. Later I learned how to use them to assert myself and remain in control.

 Once, when I was no longer a kid, I was asked for advice by a young person of my acquaintance. She had fallen into the target area of a larger, older, bullying kind of girl in the public school she attended. Her purse had somehow disappeared from her bookbag or desk, and a day or so later, in the girls restroom, she was approached by the older, larger girl. “Wanchapurseback?” The older girl ran the words together so quickly that the intended victim had to ask her several times to repeat it until she understood the question: “Want your purse back?” Then she had to parse “Whatchagonnagimmeforit?” which ultimately translated that into “What are you going to give me for it?”

The person seeking my advice told the bully that she had no money. It was later that day that my advice was sought. Here’s what I suggested she say: “I lost my purse. I don’t have it anymore. If it’s gone, I don’t have it. If I get it back, I will have it, but if I don’t, I won’t. If I don’t have it, its gone. What’s gone is gone, and won’t come back.”

The next day, when the two were alone, the younger girl trotted out the words I had offered. At first the bigger girl just listened, then (according to the younger girl), she blinked, she looked confused, and finally, saying nothing, walked away. Later that day the purse magically appeared on the desk of the intended extortion victim. It was a lesson well learned.

Just as a hammer will drive a nail, or mash a finger, words can help us do things we need to do, or cause us to do things we don’t want to do. But words, like a hammer that hits the nail, bends it and then lands on a fingertip, can have unintended consequences. It is necessary that we learn how to use the tools we have. Even then, you can’t always know what the ultimate use of those skills will be. For my young questioner, use of words became a skill that, later in her life, she used as a crisis and hostage negotiator.

You never know, when you pick up a tool, what the end use will be.

Questions For Your Conscience

[A] few questions to your conscience, for I know you have one. Is the present state of the nation republican [here used in the sense of  “democratic”] enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst of riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction, the motive and the principle that governs? These are serious and dangerous questions, but serious men ought not to flinch from dangerous questions . . . . *

Those are good questions these days, seeing as we do have a governing body that can’t get beyond positioning itself for the next election, the people be damned. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting rather leery of anyone who sets out to establish himself or herself as a “politician.” We have fallen on what I can only describe as “evil times.” But it isn’t the first time.

If you read history, either in the form of biographies or accounts of events written by those distanced enough to make balanced judgements, you soon discover that nothing happening today is happening for the first time. History does repeat itself. Over and over.

I am appalled by the number of those (elected and un-elected) who think they can speak for me about what are totally private matters, yet cannot seem to find a voice to discuss as rational men and women, those issues that are really the heart of governance: equitable taxation, rational defense, fair compensation for labor, compassionate and honest concern for the health and safety of all.

When the “great experiment” finally fails (and history tells us that surely it will), it won’t be because the idea was flawed, but because those (with the consent of the rest of us) who undertook to conduct the experiment, were themselves flawed.

Oh, the quotation at the beginning of this essay? It is from a letter dated 6 February, 1805. The recipient was Dr. Benjamin Rush, considered the father of modern medicine in America, but also a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The author: our second president, John Adams.

How would you answer?

* From Benjamin Rush, Patriot and Physician, by Alyn Brodsky, Truman Talley Books, St. Martin's Press New York, 2004.

A Job Opportunity

The second and third weekends of March the county that is home to us welcomes Spring with a festival that brings in, some years, more than fifty-thousand visitors. Our year-round population is just over two-thousand, and as a community we depend on the income from those visitors to fund many of the services we need: fire and rescue, recreation, service clubs, special school programs and the like. Many of the residents have small businesses ranging from arts and crafts to retail and lodging, and these weekends are vital to the community’s survival. So everyone finds something to do.

I usually spend two of the four days at the local fire house, where I have been a volunteer for many years. We serve a variety of locally prepared foods, including trout (from our native streams), country ham, barbecued chicken and cole slaw and green beans prepared with secret and much admired recipes. Typically, our members with young children bring them along, and before you know it, there are helping hands that are often so small it takes two of them (the hands) to hold a glass.

The day I spent this past weekend was enhanced by a small child of perhaps six, the daughter of one of our younger volunteers. I was in  charge of seeing that glasses were filled with tea (“sweet” or “unsweet,” as the sign indicated) or water or coffee so that as people passed through the food line they could pick up the included drink on the way to a table. Without asking for help I was soon being assisted by this very young person, wearing a very small (but still a bit large) fire department T-shirt. She took up the position by the ice chest, filling empty glasses for me to then fill with tea or water. She had been watching the process for some time, and when the young man who had been working with me moved on to another task, she just stepped in and took over.

I tell you about this because it impresses me in this way: we don’t have a lot of opportunities for the kinds of experiences city kids have. We have a school system that only has about 200 kids in the kindergarten-through-high-school cohort. There are service clubs for the teens, like 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America), but the little kids have to begin somewhere, and it is often in the fire house during the spring and summer and fall and winter fund raisers. Our young people often go on to service jobs: food, machinery, people. We have more than a few nurses, EMTs, Paramedics and Fire Fighters who are employed professionally in adjacent counties. There are garages and speciality shops serving the agricultural and logging enterprises, and a few restaurants and a hotel and a motel and B&Bs, and a medical center, as well as pure commercial enterprises. They are successful because the people of the community understand serving others, and they learn that at a very young age.

I suppose there are parents reading this who react with horror at the idea of a five-year-old carrying a tray of dishes from the table to the dishwashing window, or wiping a table or putting ice in glasses or even washing dishes (always under the supervision of at least a teenager), but this is the way we pass on our philosophy of life: being a citizen is being part of a community, and a community is people working together for a common goal. Ours is to preserve the place we live and the way we live.

Maybe we need to get the politicians in Washington to come work with us for a weekend.