My New Life

An open letter to all my dear friends, old and new, valued colleagues, classmates, co-workers, neighbors:

The month of July has been overwhelming to say the least.  I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I received an email on Independence Day from Mr. Ulf Van Anderson from the Cyber Lottery in the Netherlands.  As Mr. Anderson explained it, “The online electronic-raffle draws was conducted from an exclusive list of 250,000 international emails accounts picked by our Electronic Random Selection System (ERSS) from an exclusive list  However, no tickets were sold. After the automated computer ballot collection, your E-mail address emerged as a winner category ‘A’…” This means that I won €1,000,000!  That’s something like $1,450,000!  Exchange rates are very variable, of course, but that is a whole lot of money, and all I had to do was tell them my name, address, phone number and a few other trivial details. I could get a new lawnmower! The check hasn’t arrived yet, but these things take time.
Then the very next day I got an email from FedEx saying that they had a parcel for me which was being held up owing to some little procedural detail.  They didn’t explain why the email message came from Oman, but they did mention that the parcel contained a bank draft for $2,100,000 and a letter from my colleague in Ghana where the parcel was waiting for me. All I needed to do was contact them by phone in Ghana or by email, and give them a few personal details and a handling fee amounting to $210, and they would have the parcel in my hands within 24 hours.  I confess I did not respond quickly to this as I do not know anybody in Ghana or even anybody who has been there, or anybody who has $2,100,000 to give me, but then I figured, what the heck.  That’s a pretty good return on $210.  I expect the check to arrive any day now and I guess I should give some thought to what private island to buy.
At about the same time I got this sad email: “My name is Muhammed Azeem, Am the CEO of Al Muhad Contracting Co., in United Arab Emirate. I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer and i have less than two months to live. I have been sick for almost a year now it has gotten worse. I want you to assist me to dispatch my wealth to a charity organizations. For helping me, you will receive 30% of the money.” Maybe he got my email address from the FedEx people in Oman.  He didn’t say how much money we are talking about here, but he is bound to be rich as Croesus.  He said to respond to a Japanese email address, so I guess he is getting treatment there, and is probably too sick to deal with this sort of thing, poor man.
And then the next morning I got a message from the Obama Foundation offering me $500,000 just as soon as I supply the usual details.  Well, this surely must be a trustworthy offer since President Obama wouldn’t dare lend his name to anything that wasn’t on the up and up.  It is a bit worrying though that he would be using a bank in the UK rather than one here.  Are our banks headed for the cliff again?
Then, within 24 hours of this I got two more tempting offers:
From Hong Kong: “Hello Friend, I am Mr. Si-Wan Park, manager on deposit and remittance in Woori Bank,Hong Kong.; I have a sensitive, confidential brief from Hong Kong and I am asking for your partnership in re- profiling funds ($15,557,210.00 USD).
What I require from you is your honest co-operation and I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you and I from any breach of the law. Please accept my apologies, if I have encroached on your privacy without prior notice, keep my confidence and disregard this email if you do not appreciate this proposition I have offered you.
All confirmable documents to back up this fund shall be made available to you, as soon as I receive your reply via my private email (parksiwan01@hotmail.com.hk ), I shall let you know what is required of you.

Regards
Si-Wan Park“
While it’s true I have no idea what Mr. Park is suggesting, still $15,557,210 is a pretty enticing lure – how could you go wrong just finding out? And then there was the second one, again from Ghana: “On behalf of the United Nations Organization, We wish to inform you that the payment Committee in-conjunction with the Overseas Credit Commission has been mandated to compensate all the outstanding  Foreign Investors in the West African Region this quarter of the fiscal year 2011, your email and Particulars were discovered as next on the list (Category "A") due for payment of US$14,500,000.00 {Fourteen Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars} Only.”  So I guess this must have something to do with my mysterious benefactor who gave a $2,100,000 check to FedEx for which I needed to supply name and address and so forth.  And here they were, asking for all that information yet again.
Unfortunately it seems possible that something might be wrong with this latest remittance, as I soon received yet another message from Ghana:
“There is information I think might interest you. First kindly confirm if you are the owner of this email address.
I am Mr. Ken Solomon, I work with foreign remittance department with a bank here in Ghana. I do not know if  am talking to the right person, But I will like you to confirm if you are the owner of this email ID. But somehow I am not comfortable and too sure that I am communicating with the right owner of this email.
If you can prove that you are the owner of this email ID, then I will furnish you with the information that I have for you, when I am convinced than I am talking to the right person and will proceed with you.
I am taking this preventive measure because I do not want to talk to the wrong person because of the sensitivity of the information regarding the issue.
Other details will be forwarded to you as soon as I am convinced that I am communicating with the right person,”
While I was mulling this over, I received a message from Moammar Gaddafi’s second wife who got my email address from Moammar’s address book.  I can only imagine he got it from Muhammed Azeem, that poor wretch with esophageal cancer being treated in Japan.  Anyway, Mrs. Gaddafi proposes that she send me $40,000,000 that she has stashed away in an Asian bank somewhere.  Then I will see to its investment in sound businesses in exchange for 30% of it.  That would be $12,000,000.  Fair recompense for an afternoon’s work, I say.  By and by her son Alaa will come over and I am to help him set up a business.  And all she needs to get this moving is the same information that I have been handing out to anybody that asks from all over West Africa and the middle east.
In similar offers, both humanitarian and commercial, I have been offered

·     £3,000,000 which amounts to something like $4,800,000 by a pathetic Greek woman who said: “I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you to use this gift which comes from my husbands effort to fund the upkeep of widows, widowers, orphans, destitute, the down-trodden, physically challenged children, barren-women and persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.”

·     30% of $19,500,000 by Mr. Song Lile, a credit officer at the Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong to “effect a transaction”

·     $15,000,000 by Mr. Chu-yu Soong, a retired operations manager of the Bank of China, Malaysia to pretend to be next-of-kin for a dormant account

·     $2,500,000,000 by a Finance Director of some bank in Lagos who says that it is there in my name and somebody name Newman Lazarus is trying to get it and whoever comes up with the $185 processing fee will be the lucky winner

·     Some substantial slice of $70,000,000,000 by Hashim al-Adly, brother of the former Interior Minister of Egypt under Hosni Mubarak who pilfered every dime and squirreled it away all over Europe.  My role would be to receive the stolen goods and launder it.

·     £12,400,000 ($20,000,000, more or less) by Mr Roy Hill to provide respectability for a scheme which boils down to robbing the estate of somebody who died intestate and 35% of whose assets are offered to me.  This is very similar to the above-mentioned proposal of Mr. Chu-yu Soong, leading me to wonder what Asian estate laws look like.

·     And finally, a stirring proposal by yet another Pitiful Rich Person, Sister Mrs. Melina Komol from Comoros Island who is circling the drain and wants to give me $4,500,000 “for the help of orphanages home, christian schools, widows, the less privilages and churches for propagating the word of God, according to my desire and my late husband before his death.”

To make a long story short, during the month of July I have been offered, by numerous people I don’t know, in various capacities, in places I have never been, something like $2,596,256,815, offset by $395 in fees.  This does not include the philanthropic and cancerous Mr Azeem from whom I am expecting numerous millions or the larcenous Mr. al-Adley whose munificence I am expecting in the billions.  I’ll be worth more than a drug cartel.
And so, when this gush of money starts pouring in, which should be any day now, I will have to put my old life behind me, buy new clothes, spend a month at a fat farm, do something with my hair, learn how to behave on a yacht, and how to address heads of state.

I’ll miss you guys.

Polls

Every time I hear some solemn commentator proclaim that 57% of Americans prefer apple juice to green tea, say, or would prefer to take a bus to work rather than travel by horse-back or whatever other choices could conceivably appear in our daily lives, I hark back to those terrible days before I ponied up $5.95 per month for caller ID. Back in that time of dashed hopes and indignation when the phone rang, I would drop whatever I was doing and dash for the nearest phone, hoping that the next voice I heard might be somebody I might actually want to talk to. Occasionally my prayers were answered. But way too many were telemarketers of one sort or another with a liberal sprinkling of people wanting to explore my preferences in men's clothing, confectionery, travel destinations and other goods and services on which I have a very weak and changeable opinion or no views at all. By the time I had disengaged from these interruptions, I had completely lost my train of thought on whatever I had been doing and as a consequence had no choice but to shout at the cats or split wood.

One memorable poll concerned M&Ms. I had come tearing up from the basement to answer this call, so when the annoying young thing asked if I could spare a couple of minutes I agreed since I was all sweaty and out of breath anyway. Then she explained in breathtaking detail that the M&M Corporation manufactured M&Ms with which I was no doubt familiar, and that up until now the colors of these things were yellow and orange and red and brown, but now they wanted to modernize and upgrade their image by adding new colors. Now that she had talked herself out and I had caught my breath and was ready to hang up she got down to the nut of the problem.

“How often do you enjoy M&Ms?” she asked. “Every day? Once a week? Once a month? 4 times a year? Never?”

“I dunno,” I replied, “every now and then I guess.”

“Would that be Every day? Once a week? Once a month? 4 times a year?” She was not to be put off. I cast my mind back over my M&M-eating history and calculated that the last time I ate M&Ms was last Halloween, so I guessed “Twice a year.”

“What color would you like to see in your next bag of M&Ms, Blue? Purple? Green? Or Beige?”

“I like the colors the way they are.”

“But if there were another color, which would you like best – Blue? Purple? Green? Or Beige?”

“I don't care. Anything would be fine.”

“But which would you like best - Blue? Purple? Green? Or Beige?”

“Blue!” I told her, since that was the first on her list, and it just popped into my mind.

Then we moved on to my second favorite color, after which we changed our focus to what brands of jeans I had heard of and then some other matter every bit as trivial as these.

By the time I finally was allowed to hang up, I had taken a begrudging interest in the proceedings. I was amazed that somebody out there was prepared to pay no doubt big money to find out if I had ever heard of Dockers, and what color Halloween candies I might like. And I was imagining some grotesquely overpaid flunky giving his M&Ms presentation up in the executive suite and concluding with “And we polled more than a thousand people and found that 73% prefer blue M&Ms, and so, gentlemen, we suggest that you retool the Atlanta plant to include blue M&Ms, a million dollar investment well worth the expense.” Based on the choices of people just like me, who were trapped into committing to something they couldn't care less about, at a time when the chops were just beginning to smoke or the resident toddler was just about to get the lid off the Drano.

Then of course there are the polls that come in the mail. They are mostly political in nature and on the last page you are encouraged to contribute $20, $25, $35, $55, or Other to the organization asking the attached vague unanswerable questions. The multiple choice questions run to such deep and thoughtful matters as Do you think that the United States Congress is composed primarily of self-serving idiots? Answer: Yes, No, Other.

And of course the ever-popular issues-based questions such as Do you think it is wise to squander another trillion dollars we will have to borrow from China to invade yet another distant oil-bearing nation nobody can spell? Or Do you want to see an army of godless bloodthirsty heathens sweep across Our Great Nation, raping our daughters and peeing in our flower beds? Both of these questions are gathering numbers for the same thing, of course, but now one side will declare that a clear 80% majority is against it while the other side will present its 80% in favor statistics. Then they will glare at one another, a vote will be taken and whichever side can promise the largest profits for some large industry will win.

So next time you hear some congress person or political commentator saying that 76% of the nation wants [insert issue du jour here] ask yourself where did they get that number.

Meanwhile, remember that 68% of American citizens east of the Mississippi River, believe that Caller ID is the greatest technological achievement of the 21^st century.

Winter Project

Suddenly one cold day I discovered a pressing need for all my iceberg stuff. All those reports and books and references and photographs. The proposals and outlines diligently prepared all those years ago. I looked in my main filing cabinet. I knew there was nothing there of interest, but it was close and easy. Nope, nothing there.

With slightly greater optimism I tried my backup filing cabinets, drawer by drawer, and actually did find one or two vaguely relevant things tucked in between the computer parts and lawnmower manuals, but nothing close to the mountain of material I knew was somewhere under that roof. Of course, I knew all along where it was, but hoping for a miracle is an essential part of the human condition. Days passed, and I glanced at the door to the attic every time I went upstairs, quickly looking away. Too cold today. Too dark right now. Pressed for time.

Finally I ran out of excuses that were good enough even for me. I took a deep, tired breath and opened the door. I picked up a huge empty box directly in front of the door and threw it on top of that pile of beds. Sidled past the kerosene heater and stepped over the pile of posters and maps on the floor. They had been all neatly rolled up in an inconspicuous corner last fall, but I unrolled them and weighted them down with books, and now that they are flat again, I realize I have no place to put them, so they will be there forever.

I tripped over a box full of skates and kicked a path through the suitcases and finally stood in full view of all those relict boxes that have been right where they currently stand since 1987 when I moved down from Canada.

I spot one under a table and pick my way over for a look. Bingo! It contains K through P of my iceberg files from Newfoundland. But it’s behind a lot of heavy stuff, so I decide to leave it there, knowing where at least one stash is. I turn carefully and scan other boxes. I open one and find what appears to be a 50-lb. collection of my father’s most useless files. Why are they here, I wonder. I pick up another box and put it on top of them, clearing a precious 2 square feet of floor space. Dust rises around me as I open the flaps. Two sketch books, barely used. A solar energy guide and a bunch of far back issues of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Assorted detritus from British Columbia, circa 1974-9.

The next box contains a set of The Harvard Classics. I sit on it and look into the box next to it. Promising. Stuff from Newfoundland. Files, photographs, resumés. After 2 or 3 good sneezes I pick up this trove and head for the door, being careful not to step on the poster pile, but triggering a box slide on my way out. There is only one clear flat surface downstairs that is also relatively free of cats. It is the floor on the way to the bathroom.

I drop the box in front of a chair and start sorting through its contents. There is a fat photocopy of an obsolete software manual. Out. There are many many notices of seminars and memos describing administrative procedures and changes from a place I left in 1986. Why are they here? There are letters about all kinds of things. I read them and relive the joys and frustrations of long-dead undertakings. There are jokes I had taped to the door of my office, and letters from a lunatic who thought I was going to become a Lutheran and go live with him in the Yukon. There is actually some iceberg stuff.

When I am done, the box is empty and I am surrounded with piles. One of the larger piles is about 2 inches of empty file folders that were interspersed among the other stuff. Why did I keep a 2-inch pile of empty file folders? Now there is no clear flat surface in the house. The iceberg pile is small, but pithy. I square it up and leave it there. I move the memos and the computer manual into the recycling pile. It is suppertime. Maybe I’ll bring down another box tomorrow.

The Black Folk of Buckingham

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s extraordinary book, The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early days of the civil rights upheavals. The primary protagonists are some black domestics and their white employers. As the story unfolded I kept flashing back to the distant untroubled years of my childhood in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, just 50 easy miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. Any resemblance to Jackson was thin at best. We did not have lynchings and everybody used the same toilets and buses as far as I know. However, there was a black community, although I don’t recall seeing many of them except for a very small number, some of whom played starring roles in my early maintenance and instruction.

Howard Blackstone, for example, who worked across the road for my grandfather on a small, diverse farm. His primary skill was blacksmithing and he made a wide variety of things like horse shoes and hinges and cart wheels and such. But it was a small farm with limited needs for blacksmith products, so Howard did other things as well.

One late fall day in, perhaps, 1938 or so my father, a young man at the time, and Howard were sent to Brown Brothers auction to look for something or other for the farm. It was the sort of auction where just about anything might turn up – shovels and tractors and poultry and tedders and yokes and plows and watering troughs, a wide variety of stuff that some farmer somewhere in the county discovered that they didn’t need anymore. They wandered back and forth along row after row of rusty implements and anxious goats until they got right to the back where the small items were displayed, or dumped, depending on your aesthetic sense, and there they found a great chain, a large, robust chain suitable for pulling stumps and freeing mired tractors. Their bid was successful and so by and by they returned to the distant reaches of the auction yard to collect their prize. My father took one end of it and Howard took the other and they started winding their way back to the parking lot. It was not long before my father noticed that their little parade was attracting attention. Gaping stares, in fact. When he turned around to look he discovered that Howard had wrapped his end of the chain around his neck and was staggering tragically along, arms raised to heaven.

Some years later when I was very small we had a sleigh, and a horse to go with it and enough snow in the winter that Howard could take us kiddies out for a toot around the neighborhood. There were bells attached to some part of the harness and we jangled along just like something out of a Bing Crosby movie. I don't remember where we went but photographic evidence still exists that we went somewhere. Mostly I remember just starting out from the barn leaving brown streaks in the snow until the rust was cleaned off the runners.

It was about this time that Nancy came to us. She lived in the room over the kitchen, a large spacious affair that she referred to as her house, as in “Don't you come into my house before you wash your hands!” She previously worked for the neighbors across the street who always resentfully accused us of poaching her away from them, but I once got a look at the broomcloset she lived in there and can't imagine that it was a difficult negociation.

She was a Jehovah's Witness, a strike against her which I think caused some parental discomfort, but she was made to understand that the children were to be washed and fed, not converted. And so it was that our religious instruction or lack of it was left up to my parents and the Buckingham Friends School. However, she did take us with her when she went around peddling Watchtowers and I have always wondered what her customers thought when this young black woman turned up at their doors with two little white tykes in tow.

I think she was secretly appalled by the bad habits my parents lavishly indulged in like drinking and smoking, but she had the good sense never to say anything about them. The only hint came one morning after the annual traditional cocktail party the parents always held for the neighborhood during which all their respectable friends, doctors and bankers and stockbrokers and such came and drank themselves blind and then wobbled and swerved on home in the great swaying behemoths issued by Detroit in those days. The residue after these extravaganzas was an unimaginable number of bottles. My father was struggling out to the end of the driveway with great clattering sacks of these one day when Nancy appeared on some errand.

My father boyishly observed “If anybody were to look into our trash, they'd think we were a bunch of lushes.”

“They got no business looking in your trash!” replied Nancy indignantly.

At one point she fell afoul of the IRS. It couldn't have been a catastrophe on an absolute scale since she didn't have the assets for it. But it was a catastrophe in her eyes and she was nearly undone when she finally asked my father to help with it. It took a while for him to understand what the problem was partly because of her non-linear and barely comprehensible account of the matter and partly because all IRS personnel involved were referred to as “the man at the post office,” which apparently stood in for any functionary she had been in touch with. The matter, whatever it was, was finally resolved after a few more conversations with the Man at the Post Office, and ever after that I think she considered my father to fall somewhere between saint and genius and slayer of dragons.

Nancy was a city girl. She lived in Philadelphia when she wasn't with us. She also had a son. That was a long story I didn't hear until half a century had passed. She had relatives in Philadelphia who looked after this child while Nancy was with us, during the week. Then she would return to the city on the weekends. In the summer she would take along armloads of vegetables which my father grew in abundance, including a row of okra grown especially for her since none of the rest of us would touch it. In fact the only cruel thing she did to us during our long association was to make us eat that stuff, and, to her credit, she only did it once.

We also had animals, some sheep, a couple of steers, a couple of horses. These were, for the most part well-behaved creatures. They stayed within the boundaries alloted to them except on those rare occasions when a fencepost fell down or a gate was left open on which occasions they would taste the heady brew of liberty and other peoples flower beds and steps would have to be taken to get them back. In a clear demonstration of the existence of cosmic pranks, these daring escapes most often took place 2 or 3 days after my parents left on a 3 week trip to the back side of the moon, leaving Nancy in charge of our small world with the promise of help from my grandfather, if necessary and available. It was a monument to her courage that she was prepared to face down these large creatures that terrified her with the implacable dignity of a Masai queen, armed only with her faithful broom, her weapon of choice in the face of all perils.

I went to visit her once in South Carolina where she was living in retirement near her brother. Her house was small, cluttered and cleaned to within an inch of its life. There were framed photographs here and there of various events and family members, and I was surprised to discover that during the time she spent with us she was drop dead gorgeous. Why hadn't I noticed this at the time?

It was during that visit that she told me about her failed marriage. She was married at the age of 19 or 20 soon after completing her nursing training. Her husband was in some sort of business that took him and his new bride to Toronto. They got a small house in the sort of place where the back fence is about 10 feet from the kitchen window and she was left in it to wash the dishes and dust the furniture while he went off into the Great World to ply his trade. She hated it. It was cold, grey, and she didn't know anybody. Soon she was pregnant. Then one gloomy day she was standing at the sink looking out the window at the neighbor's trash cans over the back fence and realized that now she was Absolutely Stuck. She would be bound to this dreadful place by her husband and soon her child and then no doubt other children and she would never see her childhood friends again, never feel the intense summer sun of South Carolina on the back of her neck, never experience the joy of her church back in Philadelphia. And so it was that one day she packed up her clothes and returned to Philadelphia where she was taken in by her many friends and relatives. How she came to work out Beyond the 'Burbs I never did learn.

In any case, Nancy and Howard and a small number of others, casually met, represented all black people to me. So when the race riots and civil rights upheavals hit the headlines I was mystified. I could not imagine why anybody would want to exclude these people from the country's mainstream. At the same time, I have come to understand that I actually know nothing about the reality of these people I thought I was so close to – where did they go to school, what were their prospects, how did they come to live the lives they did. Were they happy?

Privacy

We start life wet, noisy, and completely free of any claim or expectation of privacy. No part of our bodies or lives is excluded from invasion by friends and strangers alike, and at first we don't much mind. It's not long, however, before we object to being groped by strangers and are more selective about who gets to see us with our pants down. Before long, perhaps about the time we first learn the potential of speech, we start having secrets. It is not a big step between secrets and privacy, the only difference being one of degree. A secret is just a single thing you don't want to reveal. Privacy is a great tangled complex of secrets that are of great importance to their owner. In fact it could be argued that those things we choose to keep private more accurately reflect our character than those we choose to reveal.

We each of us develop our own private kingdoms in a series of concentric barriers around parts of us that we do not want scrutinized. The outermost barriers are easily crossed by friends and spouses and even trusted acquaintances, allowing access to non-critical areas that we might not want published in the daily paper, but no great harm done if the postman discovers, say, that we vacuum less than we should. The closer to the core we get, the more closely guarded we become, and in many cases the protected areas depend on who we are talking to.

We would have little hesitation discussing our stock portfolios and the appraised value of Grandma’s diamond brooch with the family lawyer, but we might not want to enlarge upon such topics with our daughter’s boyfriend with the nose ring.

We freely describe our rashes and boils and disgusting discharges with the family physician, but might hold back in this area with the telephone repairman.

We may luridly detail the latest developments of our torrid dalliances to our best friend, but wish to maintain a discreet silence with the vicar.

In addition to these specific revelations that we control on a person to person basis we are constantly patrolling our perimeters to protect ourselves from unauthorized invasion by strangers. Common courtesy is our main fence. In a uniform society in which all members understand the signals, saying “Butt out!” with a look, a tone of voice, a bland comment inoffensive to all is a common practice. We back off, change course, no one is offended or invaded. Apart from a few people who want to offend us or don't care if they do, the system works quite well.

Where the problem arises is when we are confronted by somebody who is using another set of rules. Either they do not understand our signals, or they actively seek to breach our defenses for some purpose. We often react strongly to these attempted invasions. First we try formality. Next comes frigid silence. And finally, when all else fails, we fall back on rudeness. In some cases, such as persistent telephone solicitors, rudeness is the only defense possible. In others, such as foreigners using different signals, we would like to be kind, but we feel under attack, and may overreact to perceived aggression.

One of the worst mistakes we make in our relationships with others is believing that people we are close to should have no secrets from us, that we should be open books to our parents and spouses and friends. Or in other words we should not mind a bit upon finding Mom going through our drawers and throwing stuff out or demanding an explanation for THIS! The fact that we have been out on our own for several decades and have the white hair to prove it, have been leading independent lives and are doing fine doesn't neutralize the trespass, or detoxify the resentment. We need some space that is ours alone or we risk losing ourselves.

In addition, our own notion of what areas must be maintained inviolable may differ greatly from that of others. Is religious belief an acceptable area to open to the public? Or money? Or our psychotic relatives? In some cases yes, in others no.

So much of our behavior is governed by our need to maintain our privacy, it is small wonder that so much heat is generated over political movements whose aim is to invade areas cherished by some as intensely private; by others as matters to be dragged into public view in front of a studio audience.

If media reports are to be believed, upcoming generations will entertain no expectations of privacy. They will accept as normal the impertinent questions put by online merchants and special interest websites and will obediently supply their preferences in reading, viewing and listening, clothing, medications, sports teams, and holiday destinations. They will cheerfully welcome, rather than resentfully tolerate, the inescapable intrusion of advertising in all aspects of their lives. They will not mind that Apple Inc., the FBI, or Big Brother listens to their phone calls or traces their movements. Perhaps it is the vanguard of this new demographic that appears on Dr. Phil.

In any case it seems ironic that a people that has always prided itself on its rock-ribbed individualism would so easily abandon this myth in favor of bobble-head compliance with the demands of private industry and shadowy government interests.

Strangers in the Day

I believe this to be true: there is a magic in strangers. These mysterious beings have far more potential than the flesh-and-blood people we actually know. That dark-haired man at the airport picking through the NASCAR monthlies at the news vendor could be the next in line for the Swedish throne. Who knows? Or he could be the money man for Al Quaeda on his way to New York to assemble the funding needed for the definitive conquest of western Europe. Or maybe a high school social studies teacher from St. Louis come east for a quick visit with his mother who has been hounding him since last August to come see her. I know which identity I would prefer and which one is most likely but, most importantly, not which one is true.

People we don't know before we encounter them as part of a known group don't really qualify as strangers because right off the bat we know something about them. We may only know that they are members of the Baptist Curling and Garden Club, or friends with our old classmate, Adelaide, or take courses in renaissance poetry, but this is enough to assure us that this new untested person is probably not an ax murderer or a Columbian drug lord, since such people would not be present in these groups. A true card-carrying stranger is one about whom we know absolutely nothing beyond what our eyes tell us.

Any one of the plodding throng in the airport concourse could be a saint or a genius, a monster or a villain, while people who are actually known to us, with few exceptions, are merely humdrum. They may be comforting or abrasive, considerate or clever or dull as ditch water, they may complain or burp or slurp their soup, they may laugh at the wrong things and tell us we are wonderful, but for all their faults and virtues they lack the immense possibility of strangers.

I was jostling down a wide crowded sidewalk in New York once, scanning the oncoming throng for any signs of psycopaths, cutpurses, or gang rapists, which are known to prevail in such places, when I spotted a woman through the mobs. She had unremarkable clothes and no discernible make-up and was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. She was tall and graceful and had a soft brown face that could launch a thousand ships. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to stop her and stare, but she saw me gawking, lowered her eyes and was gone. Now, in reality, she might well have had the voice of Marje Simpson, robbed poor boxes, and beat her children, but she will live forever in my mind as a perfect being, a goddess.

Then there was the young man at the Calgary airport. He seemed to be part of a group of university students headed for the slopes. The girls giggled and pushed to impress the boys with their light-hearted wit, while the boys romped and pushed and pretended they didn’t notice the girls. Meanwhile, my young man just stood waiting for the plane, neither a part of nor apart from the others. He possessed a massive dignity and self-possession that most politicians can only dream of. I imagine him transfixing crowds with speeches of great conviction and wisdom, stepping up to the podium to accept his Nobel prize, moving confidently through the board rooms of the nation solving intractable problems and settling labor disputes. Actually he probably sells pre-owned cars during the day and relaxes in his undershirt with a brew in the evening, but I'll never know.

Once I was travelling by train through Europe. The trip included a stopover somewhere and my understanding was that I would have to move from the car I was on to another car on the same train when we stopped since the car I was in was going somewhere else. Either that or I would have to change trains entirely. I wasn't exactly sure.

The carriage was one of those quaint arrangements favored by foreigners where you got to sit in a compartment with up to 7 other people with their bundles and boxes threatening to spring from the overhead rack into the startled faces of the other occupants. We were just about to pull out, and we were all casting optimistic glances at one another, thinking that we might get away with fully occupied rather than jam packed when the door slid open and a large businessman stepped in and stared at a too-small small gap among the passengers. Hoping that he would go somewhere else, the people next to this gap stood their ground until he headed right for them, kicking aside baskets and umbrellas on the floor. Then he rearranged the overhead rack to make room for his suitcase and sat.

Now we were moving, everybody had made themselves as comfortable as possible in the suddenly diminished space. After a minute or so the Interloper burrowed unto his jacket and came up with a big black cigar about the size, shape, and aroma of a dog turd, which he lit, with much puffing and cloud formation. In our tiny crowded compartment with all the windows closed. Happily I was sitting right next to one of the windows, and opened it as far as it would go, while some of the others glared daggers at the completely oblivious monster of depravity. The unruffled Interloper announced that he was sensitive to draughts and demanded that it be closed, ignoring the daggers, and so we rattled our way through rolling fields, picturesque woodlands and distant mountains, trying not to inhale.

At last we approached our destination. People started gathering up their coats and packages. I groped out my ticket to see if I could make sense of the instructions and laid plans to find an anglophone somewhere to tell me where the next train, should it not be this one, left from.

As I was gathering up my luggage the Interloper said something in German, of which I understand 3 words on a good day. I made a Gallic sort of “Dunno, sorry” gesture and edged toward the door. Then he snatched my ticket and was out the door and onto the platform. I picked up the pace and set off after him wondering if I should scream for help, hit him with my purse, grab him by the collar and what? It soon became clear that he was headed for a ticket window with a huge line. He stormed up to the front of the line, shoving aside all the people who had been standing there since lunch time and shoved my ticket through the bars barking commands or noisy explanations or something. It is really hard to find a suitable reaction when you have not the least faint clue what is happening so I just stood among the hostile customers clutching my luggage with the alert intelligent expression of a squirrel wrapped up in an anaconda.

Soon the fracas at the ticket window ended and my guy came out with a different ticket. He had discovered that as long as he had my ticket I would follow him anywhere like an imprinted duckling, so off we went at a great rate of knots past ticket windows, food kiosks, many platforms, finally turning down one of them until there was a conductor. Now he said a lot of things in German, he pointed to me, to the ticket, to the train, and then he was gone. The conductor helped me get my luggage onto the train, found me a seat, and in about 10 seconds, this new train had left the station. This final leg of my trip was long enough to reflect upon this bizarre interlude. I realized at last that this appalling loud, aggressive man with his disgusting cigar and complete disregard for his fellow passengers must have got a glimpse of my ticket with its final destination and, being familiar with this route, had known that there was a tight connection and for no reason beyond pure untainted kindness had done what would have taken me the rest of the week to do to get me on the right train headed in the right direction with seconds to spare.

What it comes down to is that a stranger is a sort of larval form, since it seems true that the transition from unknown to known necessarily involves some sort of transformation. My savior on the train morphed from mystery to brute in a matter of seconds. But then underwent a backflip and there he was applying for sainthood within a very short time. Most people make the transition invisibly. They start out essentially invisible, and slowly assume shape and name and then there they are, unique and startling, and we wonder why we can’t remember our first meeting.

My husband was the flip side of this. I noticed him immediately, tall, dark and handsome. This aura clung to him right up until we were married. This somehow triggered the transformation, which continued through a couple of years of squabbling and whining, and now, years later, all I can remember is the intestinal gas.

Sea Cruise

I love ships. I love the sea. I love the throaty roar of marine diesels. I therefore thought I had died and gone to heaven when I managed to talk my way on board the HMCS Cormorant, a Canadian Navy sub tender bound for Lancaster Sound for various reasons, including sending its little sub down to the seabed off the Labrador coast to look for places where icebergs had hit the bottom and carved trenches in the sediment. I attended meetings to discuss the work. With earnest expression I spoke of dropstones and relict scours. In private I skipped and whistled sea chanteys.

Finally departure was imminent. I had packed and repacked a dozen times. Although I had never been troubled by seasickness, everybody involved in the trip warned me that it was lunacy not to start the trip with a Gravol, just to be sure. So I did. And I soon discovered that the primary effect of Gravol is drowsiness. A deep and insurmountable drowsiness. I first noticed this about the time we dragged our last box down into the hold. I flopped down onto it and was all set set for a little nap when a crewman bustled in and told me I had to move since he had to tie everything down. I shuffled back up the ladder to the deck and spotted a big soft coil of rope in which I made a nest and was just about sound asleep again when another crewman chased me off it, offering the weak excuse that he needed it. A lifeboat caught my eye and I was headed for it when yet another busybody threw a canvas over it and tied it down. I finally found a nook right up in the bow next to the anchor chain and went right to sleep for two hours, completely missing our departure from St John's harbor. But I wasn't seasick.

The HMCS Cormorant, it turned out, started life as an Italian fishing trawler. The Canadian government got a deal on it and made it over into a sub tender, which means that they added a large, heavy enclosure to keep the sub in and finally the large, heavy sub itself, which effectively moved the center of gravity a good deal higher than it once was. The result of all this was a very slow-moving little ship that wallowed like nobody's business in almost no sea at all.

There was to be another ship in our little convoy which was the HMCS Protecteur. This was a much larger, more serious navy ship, with guns and secret handshakes and no women. As we steamed out of port, the HMCS Protecteur was down in Halifax having a last minute repair. Nobody was concerned by our head start since we were such a pitiful scow and they were such a big sleek ship of the line and would catch up with us in a couple of days as soon as she was clear of Halifax.

So we settled happily into our routine of dining in the officers' mess, partying with the chiefs and petty officers, and chatting with the folks on watch.

We had put Newfoundland behind us and were on our way up the Labrador coast when word came that the mighty Protecteur was still stalled in Halifax. Our new instruction was to slow down until further notice.

Meanwhile, a storm had begun to form and seemed to be heading our way. The swells had already caught up with us and we wallowed constantly. Some of the crew started skipping meals and the first pea-green faces started to appear. After a couple of days the storm had developed as a tight little well with howling winds and green water over the bow. After the deafening crash of a thousand pieces of crockery at lunch one day we sustained life with sandwiches on paper plates.

Meanwhile, back in Halifax, the majestic Protecteur had developed another problem which might be fixed tomorrow if they could get the part. I was up on the bridge when the news came and so discovered that the Canadian navy was given to exchanging bible verses in a conversational sort of way. My father had told me that this was common during WWII when he was plying the North Atlantic, and that one of their favorites was Ecclesiastes 9:4 which explains “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” which I thought was entirely suitable for our situation. I think they might have used it if the Protecteur's captain hadn't outranked ours.

At length the storm passed. We took the sub out for a romp at some unscheduled location and started getting hot food again. We received orders not to cross 60ºN. We did another dive and another, and before you knew it, a month had passed. The Protecteur had still not left Halifax, and ice was beginning to form in Lancaster Sound. So we were called back. The trip was cancelled.

After another small storm we arrived in the Straits of Belle Isle, and steamed south between Newfoundland and Labrador. We saw a little iceberg. There was a chill in the air. The crew oscillated between ill-tempered crabbiness at being stuck out at sea for so long, and giggling euphoria at being so close to port.

We entered the long fjord leading to the Corner Brook harbor early one morning. It was sunny – a beautiful day. I went out on deck to admire the unfamiliar lumps on the horizon. Then I smelled the pines. Until that moment I had not understood how much I had missed the smells of land. As we steamed slowly down the fjord we passed hay-scented islands. And finally the homey smell of a fish plant.

I loved that cruise. Even the storm. I would do it again in a flash. But one of the most euphoric moments of those six weeks was standing on the dock at Corner Brook with the gulls squawking overhead and the querulous growl of rusty pick-ups in the distance, still swaying gently with the rhythm of the ship.