Tag: Life

EPHEMERALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Much of the delight in life comes as surprises, especially when you’re paying attention. Moreover, they’re often of a very short time, a fleeting breath. Even when you’re anticipating an event, a certain unpredictability remains. You might be watching the sinking sun along with a bank of clouds, for instance, but a slight shift in conditions can spell the difference between a spectacular sunset and a dull glow in a woolly pile. And that glorious sunset, when it arises, changes second by second before dimming within five minutes.

The same can be said of family life or even a party or artistic endeavor. Much of the time, though, we’re too engaged in other matters to revel in the brief thrills. We need a bit of openness — what some call margins — in our daily activities to allow for such curiosity and wonder.

After the long, slow months of winter where I live, signs of quickening are appearing. In the early morning, the male cardinals, who have been singing defiantly from mid-January, now erupt with an insistent joyfulness, inciting other birds to join in, with hints of what’s just ahead. I haven’t been out in the woods after dusk, but any day now, the peepers will begin their sparkling chorus in their vernal ponds — the pools that will shrink to nothing by midsummer.

In our own yard, the first of the spring ephemerals (how I love that word, as well as the phrase “vernal pond” — they’re such fun on the tongue!) are now blooming, however timidly, even though most of the yard’s still covered in six inches of snow or more. (And rapidly melting.) I could present a checklist of what I expect will follow, but there are no promises — winter takes its toll, after all.

For me, this has been the first winter in a long, long time in which I can admit to suffering cabin fever. I’d have to go back to my “sabbatical” of writing more than a quarter century ago, or the ashram a decade-and-a-half before that, to find a stretch in which I didn’t have the demands of an office away from home weighing upon me. That is, requiring me to leave the house daily for hours on end. Admittedly, this winter hasn’t been completely job-free: November and December were still quite busy on that front. But the New Year turned toward retirement and new focus. What I’m experiencing is not boredom — far from it. I’ve had a full plate of writing and reading, for one thing, and I’ve enjoyed more evening and weekend social activities than I’d been able to attend in, well, it seems like forever. Rather, this strain of cabin fever feels like a time of recharging, getting ready to burst forth with the warming weather, in any number of surprising ways, if I’m lucky. So you see, this affliction is actually a kind of luxury. For now.

SUMP PUMP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

I’ve learned to listen whenever we get heavy rain. Check to see that the jerry-rigged sump pump is still upright and its line’s not clogged.

Yes, indeed: too much rain, and the sump pump kicks in. Or else the cellar floods, along with the furnace.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

THE DISAPPEARING INDIVIDUAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not too long ago, the pharmacist owned the drug store, the corner bank had its own president, the local publisher owned the newspaper, and so on. Each one knew the community, and each one could make independent decisions. Each one also had a desire to be respected by those he or she served. Often, too, it was a family affair.

Now, of course, the pharmacy is headed by a manager who reports to a district supervisor who may report to an assistant vice-president somewhere who reports to a president of a subsidiary who reports to another vice-president of a conglomerate who reports to a president who reports to a CEO who probably has little real decision-making power, thanks to all of the policies that must be followed, thanks to a board of directors beholden to the major stockholders. As if you could name any of these people. Ditto for the bank and the newspaper and what used to be the local department store.

At each level of hierarchy, there’s little room for discretionary action – it’s all a matter of enforcing policy, especially as it relates to maximizing short-term profit.

Important local leaders have been reduced cogs following orders from afar. And the big money follows. Note, too, that the emphasis is on stockholders, not shareholders, who would include the workers, their communities, and even the faithful customers.

How, then, do we reclaim our full community, and heal the damage? It’s a basic question for democracy, after all, if the American Experiment is to continue, especially with any sense of equality and fairness.

ON TURNING SIXTY … FIVE!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The milestone demands some acknowledgement, or at least a hard assessment of my life to date. To be honest, when I graduated from college, I hardly expected to survive past my mid-thirties, and the way things were going, maybe I wasn’t far off the mark. On the other hand, I never anticipated the turns this journey has taken.

For one thing, I rarely thought of journalism as my lifetime career, but rather as a steppingstone to something else. While the field could be exciting at times, getting caught up in the management side of the business took a toll, and the more recent downward spiral of the professional publishing industry in general is downright frightening.

I had envisioned myself either returning to my hometown and writing for a newspaper that no longer exists, or else working in the heart of a large metropolis with its range of concerts, galleries, lectures, and theater, possibly after going back for a law degree. Of course, neither way opened, but the ashram route did. And I, who started adulthood somewhere between agnostic and logical positivist, was now on a spiritual pathway that would lead me to Quaker practice.

As I look back on my adult life, the only thing that has made sense has been this spiritual evolution. Each of the geographic moves, ostensibly in pursuit of a career, actually introduced the next step in an expanding faith and practice. Now my generation is having to move into places once filled by the “mighty old oaks” who came before us – the most troubling aspect being that we are, all these years later, still the younger members of Meeting or, for that matter, much of literature and the fine arts.

The craft of writing has itself has taken its own curious twists within this; while the poetry and fiction have often arisen in the discipline of keeping my skills sharp in the face of the daily grind, and thus have often veered toward the “experimental” side of literature, they’ve also served as a tool for investigating the unfolding experience – something quite different from trying to “create” a poem or story. Examining a situation honestly and directly, rather than trying to be ironic, cute, entertaining, or ideologically correct, is one of the consequences; on the other hand, you’re constantly measured against some standard of innovation. It ain’t easy, balancing the two.

Nevertheless, I’ll confess to a lot of remaining frustration. All of the unfinished work before me, for instance, or the difficulty in achieving successful book-length publication, despite having more than a thousand poems and short stories published in literary journals, at this point, on five continents. On a more personal level, I could look at all of the social skills to be fostered, to say nothing of a round of grandparenting, should that happen.

Even so, as I told my wife a few months back, I have nearly everything I’ve wanted, though it resembles none of what I imagined. The crux here is in being receptive and grateful, which proves surprisingly elusive when we’re in the middle of the usual swirl.

*   *   *

This is something I wrote for myself at sixty. And here it is, with a few tweaks, five years later. Just as applicable.

LONG-DISTANCE MEMORIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the email age, the personal letter has become a cultural artifact. Here’s what might be an example from someone or another wandering, perhaps in a private desert of Sinai.

*   *   *

Greetings on this sunny but nippy Valentine’s Day! How much nicer it would be to still be abed, next to you, both of us pleasurably sated and, well, how do you like your coffee? (A local roaster makes a savory version it markets, tongue-in-cheek, as Charbucks – “You told us you like it dark.”) But now, does that mean I have to untie those silk scarves? Or go find those tiny keys again? (Dream on, old man!) Here I am, on the first full day of my fifty-first year (gads, even saying that feels a bit like coming over the first crest on the Cannonball wooden coaster at Canobie Lake!) trying to recover from another grueling double-shift Saturday at the office – the weekly 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. no-letup newspaper editor’s nightmare. So I decided to stay in from worship this morning to try to catch up on some personal affairs, including setting down that letter I’ve been composing in my head the past several weeks – and which, now that I’m at it, I can’t even begin! Which thread should we pursue first? (Fact? Or fiction?) Yikes!

Suppose we should start off by saying how much I’ve once again enjoyed all of your confessions of the journey of the emerging psyche. One of the remarkable things you are doing is giving voice to experiences in a rite of passage for a generation coming of age but who remain so incredibly tongue-tied.

One of the incomprehensible elements is the psychological pain so many teens and young adults in America carry – this, from a generation that has received more physical comforts and leisure than any other in history – food, education, fashionable clothing, shelter, cars of their own. You admit the “emotional demons, trying to survive in the face of my fragile nerves and emotions.” I wonder how that involves the essential nature of being a creative person, someone drawn to the arts, who craves a deeper experience and more fulfilling explanation of life than the material/materialistic surface can ever provide – and how much reflects a very serious and deep breakdown in American society itself, one in which the pursuit of individualism at all costs and the ever-accelerating accumulation of more and more wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands simply leaves fewer openings for most of us to come together as meaningful community. Positions that once allowed genuine opportunities for decision-making and personal expression – like the local bank president or newspaper publisher – are now just mid-level bureaucrats. And physicians and surgeons are just beginning to be sucked up in this process, thanks to HMOs or hospital conglomerates. (As one was recently quoted: “I used to be a physician. Now I’m just a health care provider.” Or as I sometimes say, not entirely in jest: “I used to be a newspaper editor. Now I’m a copy processor.”) The field – and life opportunities – have certainly changed since I set forth, and not for the better, I fear.

So pains, yes.

Wish you were here.

CELLARS VERSUS BASEMENTS AS A DIMENSION OF NEW ENGLAND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Where I grew up, we had basements. They rarely flooded. Some were even finished into spare rooms, with TVs, carpeting, or best of all, a pool table. Here in New England, most of us instead have cellars, where water seeps through the walls after heavy rainfall (some even spurt).

And so, under the house, confusion. Mold. Dampness. Leakage. Not the order of a basement, with dry walls and solid floors, but a cellar. With small garden snakes and a sump pump. Rick, our carpenter, says you find the soul of a house there. Its support. The wiring – we’ve removed many strands of stray threads overhead, each staple a bear of resistance. It wasn’t the same as the secrets we found in the kitchen walls, the 1928 newspapers, during that renovation, but secrets all the same. You sometimes read about bodies being buried in the cellar. Instead, we have trenches along the wall – and maybe some stray tree roots. I need to replace the bottom stair, the one broken from rot. And soon, I would hope, the sump pump itself with something smaller, more powerful, and more reliable.

Yes, an old New England house is always a project. Even one only little more than a century old.

ABOUT THAT ADVANTAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Where I live, you’ll often hear about the “New Hampshire Advantage,” which argues that the state’s economic growth is a consequence of its lack of income and sales taxes. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy not paying extra at the store. But I also know that the sharp difference in my rent in Manchester, when I arrived, and what I was paying in Baltimore was caused by the property taxes here. When I added my Baltimore and Maryland income taxes to my rent there, it equaled what I was paying here. Voila! You’ll pay one way or another. The question is where and who bears the brunt of the cost.

The real New Hampshire Advantage is its proximity to Greater Boston and the economic powerhouses connected with the Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nearly half of the New Hampshire population that has a job commutes south each morning to workplaces across the border. The better-paying jobs, in fact. It’s largely a one-way flow, too. If lower taxes were a real stimulus, the entire Granite State would be booming, which is hardly the case in our economically depressed North Country or the Connecticut River’s Upper Valley. Just take a look around Berlin or Claremont and all their devastation.

Still, public services cost money, and the dynamic is that anything requiring labor is going to cost increasingly more. In economics, it’s called the Baumol effect, after a study of performing arts institutions.

New Hampshire is no exception. The real question is just where the additional state revenue will come from, and that always returns us to ill-fated proposals for an income or sales tax.

But complicating any income-tax discussion in the Granite State is the matter of reciprocity: normally, you pay a state income tax where you work rather than where you live. And normally, there are roughly equal numbers of workers commuting between two states to balance the equation. But that’s not the case in New Hampshire. So an income tax to lower property tax bills, as it’s usually framed, would mean either that the cross-border commuters would have to pay twice, both at the workplace and then at home, or that those folks who both live and work within the Granite State would have to subsidize the break given to the others.

It’s a genuine conundrum. Advantage? Beggar-thy-neighbor works only so long.

30

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how much has changed since I entered the field of journalism four-and-a-half decades ago. Even as a high school student editor, I was engaged in a craft that was pretty much as it had been for the previous eight decades, in the long shadow of the introduction of the Linotype machine. We could see ourselves rooted in an even longer tradition of newspapering arising in the handset type era before that. Think of the New York Times dispatches during the Civil War. Printing was still mostly by letterpress, even though the newer offset method with its superior reproduction of photographs was making inroads. Every other week, I would trot down to our printer’s with our latest round of stories and pictures, get correction proofs a few days later, and then release the edition for publication.

We were quite limited in the typefaces available to us. I wanted what was then an elegant new typeface that our shop didn’t own — Times New Roman. Hard to believe how ubiquitous it’s become, or how much further we’ve come as well. But he did have Caslon, which became one of my favorites — in part because of its use in the Sunday editions of the New York Herald Tribune. And Bodoni, in part because of its indestructible nature, was the standard headline choice; try finding it on your computer selections these days. Photos were another matter altogether, as were student photographers. Polaroid shots were a radical leap into the future, and usually far more reliable. Polaroid?

Writers, of course, used typewriters. Not just reporters, but almost everyone except for the select few writers who could still write in longhand and have a secretary or typist service transcribe the results. Secretaries? Typewriters? Typists? And what often astonished me was how antiquated the typewriters in most newsrooms were — clunky old uprights, unlike the elegant (and electric) IBM Selectrics I’d see while passing the local jeweler’s, where they were rarely used. (Unlike those of us who were writing for a living.) The Selectrics, I might add, came into newsrooms later, only with the advent of text scanners, which was a huge setback for the written word. But that’s another rant.

Typewriters introduced their own traditions, especially on deadline. Reporters would finish the first page of a story with the line, MORE, and then begin their next page with a slug line for the story, say CITY HALL, followed by the notation, TAKE ONE or ADD ONE, and then continue. This would go on for however many sheets of paper were needed until the story was finished. And then the reporter would add the line: 30. Perhaps as — 30 — or #30#. But always thirty.

And that’s even without mentioning the carbon copies. (The what?)

We can argue where that tradition began, but it was universal in the trade. If the reporter was working on a breaking story, the first page could be sent to the copy desk, be edited, and even sent to the composing room while the rest of the story was being drafted. A headline could be written and set in type, for that matter. Minutes counted. The first part of story could even be set in hot lead type while the reporter was working toward the ending.

Editors, meanwhile, would be writing headlines using an elaborate tradition of their own. These were all valued skills. And the result mattered.

Sometimes, I can almost smell the newsroom where I became a professional, thanks to Glenn Thompson. Or his advice about keeping a journal. Or some of the others since. Still, it’s hard to believe how far I’ve come over the years.

These days, a news story comes as a single take. A computer file you scroll through. We paginate on a large computer screen, designing a page for publication. All of the highly skilled typesetters, compositors, engravers, proofreaders, and more I admired — and who provided me a safety net — are long gone. Am I getting misty?

There’s an additional reason. When it’s come to my professional career in journalism, the time has come to write:

30

WILL THE REAL ME PLEASE BRAND UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Branding, we’re told, is everything. It’s not just marketing, or even just a product. It’s the whole lineup. A slogan for differentiating one Big Box Store or high-end boutique from another (including everything inside). Even academia wants a label as a way to file a writer or artist away for easy reference, however awkwardly into one slot or another. It’s ultimately a word game, with or without an actual referent. But what if you’re a misfit, as many truly are?

In literature, the labeling relates better to those who stay within a genre or stick to a manifesto or particular technique or remain in a specific locale – an Oklahoma gothic mystery crime writer, for example – than to my favorites, especially those whose work ranges over many subjects and forms and continually grows. Likewise, I’m bewildered by how often the labels applied to them are downright erroneous, if not simply glib. Or matches one part of their output while ignoring all the rest.

This turns up repeatedly when I attempt replies for those who wish to pigeonhole me. I do what I do. The writing goes where it goes, and the revisions follow. I try to be faithful. So far, I’ve been a part-timer and non-commercial. Neither by choice, but both by fidelity. My opportunities for literary writing (in contrast to the daily journalism that’s paid the bills) have never been that easy or as sustained as I’d wish. I’ve envied those who set out knowing the direction they would pursue for a lifetime, those whose work presents a continuous focus and tone. Especially those who mature as they progress, rather than repeating a facile formula.

Looking back over my poetry and fiction from across the years – and, for that matter, across the continent – I’m struck by the ways so many of the pieces differ, at least outwardly. How varied the subject matter and approach. Here I keep intending the plainspoken, direct, clearly focused piece, and keep winding up with Mixmaster compounds and distillations. Maybe my mind’s rarely that unified; instead, a multitude of mental and emotional activities have kept occurring simultaneously and the most I could hope for is some convergence. Besides, so much of my writing has arisen in some opposition to my daily employment, with all of its own dulling repetition – my writing keeps veering toward the “experimental” fringe, if only in reaction to the daily grind of news stories and headlines. Or, in the past decade, obituaries. Through much of my adult life, I’ve felt torn and uprooted, from Ohio and Indiana to the East Coast and then Washington State and back again. To say nothing of my love life and social environment. The nature poems stand in contrast or discord with the police blotter love poems or, in turn, with my current home setting. That, before I even consider my fiction or the genealogy or Quaker expressions.

(Have I performed the daily journalism to pay the bills while I pursued my literary endeavors? Or had I pursued the literary work as a way of keeping my journalism skills sharpened? What started as one wound up the other, and then shifted back again.)

The writing, in turn, has been an attempt to bring some understanding to all the eruption I’ve experienced. The turns in the road, the setbacks, the advances. A quest for understanding and, if not clarity, some meaning or permanence. I tend my personal journal because I forget so much, and often record observations I will not comprehend until years later. Am baffled, because I have yet to define my mission with a label that sells. Write, then, to discover myself in this morass.

Still, I’m open to suggestions. If you can.

ONE PHONE CALL TOO MANY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Journalists learn the importance of covering all the bases they can before the deadline cutoff. You learn the risks of running a single-source story. Even when you’ve talked on record to several people, you’re urged to make one more phone call. Just to make sure.

Sometimes, that’s when the reporter tells an editor, “There’s no story.”

“What do you mean?”

It was simply a rumor. It didn’t happen at all. The problem was fixed long ago. The guy we were going to praise has a serious drinking problem. The person who called in the tip is a crook or simply dishonest. You get the picture.

As for what had seemed to be a hot story, there was just one phone call too many.