Watching the mountain burn

I was beginning this post early this morning, but after many changes, including changes to the title, my laptop gobbled up most of the text. Because of that, the reference to the shipwreck in the last paragraph makes no sense. But it makes sense in the context of the document floating out in cyberspace. I am posting this only to remind me to make all my changes in a Word document.

The sky looked unusual just before dawn this morning. I thought it was because of the spotty, dark clouds moving eastward out of the valley, making a patchwork of brightness and darkness as the sun rose. It turned out not to be the case, however, as the world off to the north became more visible. It then became clear that the strangeness in the scene came from smoke rising from a forest fire that had grown overnight on the mountain directly in my line of sight across Okanagan Lake.

An hour after sunrise, the smoke is rising to about twice the height of the mountain and widening to a plume that merges with the broken cloud deck. Looking toward the sky, it is not possible to tell where that happens.

There’s a terrible beauty about the Bear Creek fire — beauty because the patterns of smoke evoke my aesthetic sensibility, terrible because people’s lives have been disrupted and nobody can tell if some of those lives, in the campground, in the houses, will be changed forever. What makes the scene especially frightening is that the single thin spire of smoke I saw at first has spread out to obscure my view of the mountain altogether.

Now even the thought of a tornado or of a shipwreck could make me swallow my gum, though I avoid that reaction by not chewing gum. But any reaction in the face of nature is inadequate, a humbling reminder of our place in the vast cosmos.

The transience of memory

My sister wrote me earlier this week for some information about a troupe of Jewish singers that used to give concerts around southeastern Michigan and northwestern Ohio almost a century ago. The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan wanted to know more from her about a photo that used to hang in our home, which includes both of our parents. Growing up, we children didn’t hear much about their experience as choristers beyond the romantic detail that Mom and Dad once stayed off the bus long enough in Toledo to get married in a very private ceremony.

The studious Bodzins and the working-class Taitelbaums did not approve of whatever it was that their children were doing together (presumably, except for singing), and the couple did not announce their marriage for months. I never found out why they let the families in on the secret when they did, or how. In fact, we never even knew exactly when they got married either, because they gave a fake date to their parents. But the sparks set off by that experience lingered for years. The two families did not share more than a handful of celebrations in all the years we lived near them in Detroit.

This was the second occasion I had recently to relive some events of the distant past. My youngest (now my only) brother, Henry, came to Kelowna for a few days, and we occasionally touched on matters that, if nothing else, showed how two people growing up together could be left with two very different sets of memories.

I have been aware of this for a long time. Memories are less a matter of what happened than of what remains in the mind. And as we all have different experiences, the things that impress us about any given event will also be different.

In response to one of my occasional writings about the uniqueness and idiosyncracy of individual memory, Henry would occasionally ask me if I remembered something from our youth and I would often say no. I was never ashamed not to have retained everything that happened to me when I was young — very few people do, and I do not envy them. Besides, I could always mention something I remembered that Henry had long ago forgotten.

On this visit, Henry mentioned that when we were young — the word means something different to each of us because i am almost nine years older than he is — our mother reduced her washing load by limiting the number of towels we could use. So we dried ourselves with a washcloth instead and used a towel only to finish the job. When he said he still does that, Catherine perked up because I do the same thing. We have shared that quirky habit for years without knowing it, and, in my case, even without remembering why the practice had started in the first place.

Some life stories are interesting to people who did not live them but many are not, and how Henry and I have dealt with washcloths for more than fifty years will strike most readers as a trivial illustration of nothing. But it clearly shows how inconsequential are many of our memories.

I have often thought about another example. I was named after my father’s mother’s father. Except for his name I know nothing about the man — where he lived, what he did, how he provided for his family — yet this information was essential for his family a century ago.

We all want to leave something of value behind us when we go, but most people leave nothing but a name. The money, the reputation, the direct consequences of a life, are all swallowed up in time, sometimes fairly quickly.

I’ve been writing this piece on and off for almost a week now, and I’ll conclude with two quotations from literature. The first is Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Finally, as Kurt Vonnegut reminds us, so it goes.

Priorities

As a father of three, I used to tell childless couples that no experience is as life-changing as bringing a baby into your life. I had been born into a stable family, moved in and out of schools for a quarter of a century; I had succeeded and failed, both as a student and as a teacher; I had left my native country, been forced out of my chosen profession, and lived in cities and on farms; I had lived alone and with a family I had helped create, then left it to rebuild my sense of who I was. Yet I felt that the most decisive change in all of that was when I became responsible for another human being.

All people must constantly re-evaluate what they are doing. Is it important or not? Does it matter? Can I be doing something more meaningful and rich at this stage of life, even in this moment?

Setting priorities has become trickier. Freed from paid work, a person in my privileged position can (within limits often imposed from outside) choose how to spend each day, even whether to get out of bed in the morning. It becomes much easier to see how actions are the result of conscious choices.

Priorities are the result of playing off what has to be done against what a person wants to do. I am always aware of the necessary tasks in life. Unless I want to see the house fall apart, I do the cooking, the shopping, and the cleaning; I get Catherine to her appointments and spend quality time with her.

Of course, there are times when something that has to be done – going shopping with Catherine, for example – keeps me from doing what I want to do. Being in that situation usually makes me change my priorities temporarily.

Then there are the distractions of the Internet. I have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and one newspaper feed, from the Washington Post. Just looking at the headlines from these three sources could take me more than an hour every day. Reading the most significant articles behind the headlines could eat up another hour or two.

Writers are skillful procrastinators and masters of rationalization. It can sometimes feel like a hollow claim when I say I to want to read meaningful literature and to write. I can find all kinds of reasons to do something else. And spending time on line can be an excuse not to read or write.

Just today I learned that Nike is no longer making golf equipment. I was also encouraged to test my knowledge of European geography, and to watch a video of an elephant swimming in India. All these things diverted me into a new world of curiosity and transported me beyond the normal limits of procrastination and rationalization.

Without looking for it, I also ran across news from the entertainment industry, highlights of the lives and exploits of people whose names I did not recognize, from sports or television programs. I receive posts of these items over and over again, so much so that I can barely see more meaningful news of the day. They remind me of Thoreau saying “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

This morning, the Post offered me more than twenty fresh, mainly time-sensitive articles. Besides the normal diet of politics (more than half the articles), they included a look at new weapons being developed by Russia, an examination of confession videos in China, a warning about imminent flooding of cities on the east coast of the United States, and a local Washington story about the reduction of late-night public transit service. Consider how much time would be required to read even two of these articles.

At my age, saving time is an ongoing priority. Some things are worth the time, but others increasingly are not. No more than anybody else can I always be involved in my top priority item. And I must constantly choose how much time I will give to trivia and ephemera. There are times when I have treated the issue like the Gordian knot and just cut the cord completely by going off line. I’m old enough that the option always seems reasonable.