T. Scott

Living In This Moment

She says, "Can I have one of my pens, like yours?"

She means one of her fountain pens.  Last  summer I bought her a set of disposable ones in a rainbow of colors.

We're at Mikey's for the weekly family dinner.  I keep a stack of stuff on the credenza at home, and bring it along every week.  A couple of Josie's notebooks, her fountain pens, a box full of crayons and paint sticks.  A deck of cards with family table games.  (Tonight there's also a stack of circulars from the Sunday paper so that Josie can do a little Christmas shopping for her Mom -- Lynn will take her out to the stores on Saturday).

I ask her which color pen she wants and she picks the blue one.  I hand her that, and a notebook.  She writes,

Up on the House top!

 

Up on the House top Rain dear pas

Out jups goodol Santa

down thru the chipny with loss of

 

Then she stops and sings it to us before she goes on.  She knows several verses by heart.

She practices writing in cursive, although she's not supposed to do that yet, in first grade.  Her Mom wants her to do some of her homework, but for all of the writing implements that we have with us, we don't have a #2 pencil, and that's the only thing allowed for homework.  She'll have to wait until she gets home.  I make a mental note to add a couple of pencils to the box.

Later, after we finish eating, she plays games on her Mom's phone.  She sends Queenie a text.  She tell us the story of a dream she had last night in which she and her (imaginary) big brother were nearly electrocuted by an alien monster.  She draws a picture of the monster to show us his huge long creepy hands with lightning coming out of the fingers.  It's hard to tell how much she is remembering and how much she is making up on the spot.

We adults live in a linear world in which we grew up with pen and paper and printed books and now wait impatiently (eagerly or with trepidation), wondering when digital is going to replace all of that.  As if the flow is all one way and inevitable.  But Josie lives in the world of now.  In her world, people use fountain pens to write for recreation.  They use phones to talk and text and email.  They gather for family dinners and talk about their dreams and desires.  Printed books and digital books are different experiences that nestle comfortably alongside each other.  Live theater is as thrilling as a 3-D movie.   Sometimes you sing and dance and sometimes you listen to your iPod.

Josie teaches me to live in the land of Now.  To be grateful for the ways that I can reach out electronically without giving up nestling in front of the fire with a hardcover novel.  When I read the debates between Kindle lovers and the devotees of printed books, I think of Josie and think that we are being very foolish.

The restaurant starts to empty and we softly sing Christmas carols to each other as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

1st Day In 1st Grade

"What do you think you're going to like best about first grade, Bug?"

"I'm not sure, 'cause I've never been there before.  But I think it'll be reading and learning."  I like the distinction.  "I know what I'm going to miss the most, though -- nap time!"  She grins and I can't tell if she's kidding.  She insists that she's not.

That was a couple of weeks ago.

The other day I asked her how many books she's read this summer.  "Two hundred and eighty-eight," she replies, promptly.  When I suggest that she's exaggerating she gets mock-angry with me.  "No, really!" she says.

At dinner last night her Mom gave her a back to school kit -- her crayons and markers and glue and scissors.  A marker board that she can write "gymnastics" or "dance" on in the evening before bed so she knows what stuff to take with her in the morning.  And her own alarm clock, with an iPad dock.  We tease her that she'll be able to have Justin Bieber wake her up in the morning now.  This embarrasses her only a little.

Marian called this morning after getting Josie on the bus.  She showed Josie how to work her alarm clock last night before bed.  "When it goes off, you get up and turn it off, like this.  Then wash up, brush your teeth, get dressed, brush your hair, make your bed, and then make sure that I'm awake."

She listened this morning (having actually set her alarm to go off slightly before Josie's).  Heard it go off, heard Josie shuffling around, getting ready, coming in to check on her.   And when she peeked into Josie's room the bed was made!  "I wish it could be like this every morning!" said Marian.  "I know it won't be."  But we agreed that it was a great start.

Marian has responsibility for rounding up parents to help out with buses and cafeteria trays these first two weeks.  So I'll go out tomorrow afternoon to help guide the kindergarteners onto the appropriate buses.  I hope I don't scare 'em.

It's Not About "Balance"

Jean asked if we miss the traveling when we're home for an extended stretch.

 "I'm good for about six weeks," I said.  "And then I start getting eager to go somewhere again."

 It's been an exceptionally busy spring.  Since mid-April I have been home exactly two weekends.  It hasn't all been work -- last weekend was Salt Lake City for MEY's retirement, and the weekend before was band camp in Memphis.  And I've followed my usual practice of building in an extra day on most of my work trips so that I've got a day to play and feed my head.  (Which gave me the opportunity, in one remarkable 5 week period, to get to the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, along with several other notable museums.  And some fine dive bars.)

 I still enjoy the travel experience and despite the complaints & horror stories that one hears so often about air travel, I'm rarely inconvenienced too much -- or maybe it's just that I don't spend much time dwelling on the inconveniences.

In the front of my travel journal I list the cities that I've been to while using that particular volume.  The current one starts on February 23 of this year and the list is fourteen cities long.

 I've been able to do some of those journeys bringing only the iPad and leaving the laptop at home.  Depends on how much, and what kind of work I'm planning on getting done while I'm on the road.  If it's just email (and there is always email) the iPad has turned out to be completely sufficient.  It typically takes about an hour a day for me to get email handled and I can just about always squeeze that time out of the day, no matter how hectic the schedule is.

 If I'm working on a document or a presentation, however, I'll take the laptop.  In any case, I'm always in touch.  I very rarely bother with an out-of-office message.  I can't imagine maintaining this kind of schedule if I wasn't able to keep connected in that way.

 I saw a blog post recently where someone was trying to work out the work/life balance thing.  I rejected that notion years ago.  There was a point, probably a couple of years after I moved to Birmingham, that I realized the distinction between my "work day" and the rest of my day had evaporated.  It's not that "my life is my work" or anything like that -- it's that the time that I spend doing the things that I get paid for is seamlessly interwoven with the time that I spend doing other things.  As I've said before, I'm a library director 24 hours a day, but I'm also a doting grandfather 24 hours a day, and an amateur musician and a husband and all of those other roles that I partake of -- 24 hours a day.  I don't need to balance a duality -- I need to manage my time so that all of those roles get the time that they deserve. 

Still, as much as I enjoy the traveling and am able to interweave my responsibilities and pleasures, it does get tiring, so I'm very happy to be home for a stretch now.  As luck would have it, my next flight is five weeks from tomorrow.

Ambient Overload

Valerie asks if any of us have tried to do the kind of daily audit that Henry Cloud recommends. Somewhat sheepishly I confess that I've been doing that for over 20 years.

"Where does the time go?"  people say, wistfully.  In my case, I could tell you.  Yes, it's a little OCD I suppose.  I think of that senator from Florida who took a lot of ribbing a few years ago for tracking all of his daily activities in little notebooks.  I'm not quite as manic as he was -- but I kind of understand the impulse.

The particular context of the discussion we were having was figuring out how to arrange the time in your life in order to have the life that you want. What Cloud calls the audit (what I call my "day logs") is just a tool for helping you see where your time goes so you can make better choices.  It's all about choices.

I just finished reading Turkle's "Alone Together."   That I am not a social person protects me a bit from the excesses of constant connection that Turkle worries about.  I don't have a smart phone (yet). When we were at Disney a couple of weeks ago, I didn't post my status to Facebook because I didn't feel that people needed to know where I was.  (My mom and the people I work with knew -- that's enough). 

Clay Shirky will be one of the major speakers at the MLA meeting this year.  (Shirky, Geoff Bilder, and me. Hmmm.)  I'm looking forward to Shirky's talk and hope I can incorporate some of what he says into my own.   (He kicks things off on Sunday, I'm the Monday morning speaker).  I  expect that I'll disagree with much of what he says -- I usually do. He has a much sunnier view of social technologies than I do and I think he is flat out wrong about what their impact on politics and culture is.  That's okay -- he's thought-provoking and his reputation is as a really good speaker.

But I'm thinking about him now as I'm thinking about managing time and dealing with connectivity in the context of a post that Nick Carr put up earlier this month on different kinds of information overload. He quotes Shirky saying, "It's not information overload. It's filter failure." This is the pleasantly optimistic view of a lot of the techno-geeks. The more information, the better -- we just have to build better tools to sort it all out, and that, of course, is just going to happen because that's what we're so good at doing.  (This is a point of view that has been thoroughly debunked by David Levy, who doesn't get nearly as much attention as he deserves in these discussions.)

Carr approaches it by saying that it's more complicated than Shirky thinks (most things are). "Information overload actually takes two forms... situational overload and ambient overload."

"Situational" is what we tend to think of -- it's the needle in the haystack problem. This is what librarians worry about. With all the stuff out there, how do we get you to the piece that you need?

But Carr says, this isn't really the problem. We are building better tools to deal with this and when we say that we're suffering from information overload, this is not the kind of overload that we're referring to. "Ambient overload," he says, is that we're surrounded with so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the pressure of keeping up. This is what prevents us from focusing. This is what continually distracts us.

Better filters aren't going to solve this problem. While they winnow out the stuff we're not interested in, they deliver vastly greater amounts of stuff that we ARE interested in. So we're still overwhelmed.

We don't need better tools. We need a kind of daily discipline that enables us to focus on the things that are of most value to us. This is what Cloud is trying to get at with his daily audits, and the other techniques he discusses.  Every moment that we spend is a moment of choices. What kind of a life do you want to lead?  Make better choices.

Touching the words

Their birth dates are all in the early 1990s.  They're undergrads in the Honors class that Liz & Sylvia are teaching, and I went in yesterday to talk about issues involving copyright and plagiarism and retractions in the context of the role of librarians in preserving and transmitting culture.  I wanted to frame it, as I often do when talking about this stuff, by comparing the world that we now live in with the beginnings of print culture in the late 15th century.  I'll usually talk about what a long time it took from those beginnings for a truly mature print culture to emerge.  I've often used the phrase "the mature print culture that we all grew up in" because my audiences have always been people for whom that's true.   But I realized as I was speaking yesterday that I'd have to say, "The mature print culture that I grew up in..."  as contrasted to the nascent digital culture that they've grown up in.  Digital natives.

I wrote a letter to Josie yesterday morning, as I do every few months.  I imagine these letters to be read by a Josie who is 12 or 14 or so, a young woman who'll get a kick out of reading about what she was like in her own pre-literate era.  But she is emerging from that now.  Her reading is clearer every time I see her, and her writing is getting stronger.  We spent nearly twenty minutes after dinner the other night as she wrote out for me a Valentine's Day poem that she'd learned at school.  When we were at  John & Evelyn's some weeks ago, we'd get up in the morning together and she'd write in her diary sitting next to me while I wrote in mine.

Soon I'll have to quit writing letters to her older self -- I'll need to be writing them to the girl she is now. And then, I think, will she want to write back to me? She's fascinated right now with her ability to form words.  But for how long will the notion of putting pen to paper, rather than fingers to keyboards, retain any appeal?

Twenty years ago, for reasons that I won't go into here, I switched my daily journal writing from the notebooks that I'd been using to the computer.  For about five years, I did all of my journal writing that way.   But the letters that I wrote to Lynn were done with pen on fine stationery (the way I write letters to Josie now).   After I moved to Birmingham and the flow of letters to Lynn gradually slowed (although it never has entirely stopped, and it never will), I found myself moving back to the pen and paper journal.  It seemed to give me something I was missing.

There is an intimacy to writing with a pen on paper that cannot be replicated electronically.  The screen is forever between you and the words.  There is an esthetic quality to the pen and ink and paper that is inherent in their physicality.  It is rare, very rare, that I will spend half an hour in a bar or restaurant writing in one of my leather bound Italian journals and somebody won't make some comment about how beautiful the journal itself is.  The envy in their voices, and the sense of desire to handle such beautiful objects is palpable.   We are physical creatures, not digital constructs, and we respond to physical things.  Sometimes I need to write something down for the content and any medium will do.  Sometimes I ache for the physical act of writing and nothing can substitute.

I've pointed out many times that if I'm writing an essay, I want to do it at the keyboard.  That's the best tool.  But if I'm writing a love letter to Lynn, a fountain pen and fine paper are the only sensible  tools to use.  Neither is better than the other in any absolute sense -- they have different qualities which make them appropriate for different purposes.   I don't think my chef's knife is better than my paring knife -- I need them both when I'm working in the kitchen.

I expect to be writing letters to Josie for the rest of my life.  I'll certainly communicate with her electronically as well, but the letters are a kind of communication that can't be replicated in any other medium.  As my little digital native grows older, I hope that she never loses touch with the magic of making little marks by hand on pieces of paper -- little marks that change lives.

 

Apparently, It Starts Early

Josie got her first phone call from a friend yesterday.    Ashleigh called and left a message on Marian's cell.  Josie called her right back and they talked for ten minutes.  This is by far the longest phone conversation she's ever had.  If she spends 2 minutes on the nightly phone call with her dad or her mom (depending on whose house she's at), that constitutes a very long conversation.  She'll call me or Nonni on occasion when she's got big news to share, but she'll tell the news and then quickly get to her standard signoff, "Love you, bye!"

At Mikey's, we're sitting at the table finishing dinner and Ashleigh calls again.  Marian sees who it is and hands the phone over.  Josie says, "Hi Ashleigh!"  She says, "Oh, thank you."  She says, "Let me go to the bathroom so we can talk about this," and bounces out of her chair and heads down the hall without so much as a glance at her Mom or a word to the rest of us.  We look at each other with amused and shocked faces.  Me, the clueless guy at the table, says, "I thought they learned to do that in high school!  I didn't realize it started when they were five."

Josie's in the bathroom a long time.  Marian asks Tanya, the waitress, to poke her head in when she's back there.  Tanya comes back and reports that she can hear Josie chattering away in the stall.  Finally, Josie comes back, hands the phone to her Mom, and takes her seat.  She's wearing a very self-satisfied smile. 

"So what did you talk with Ashleigh about?" asks her Mom.  Josie raises her eyebrows slightly and makes the zipper motion across her lips.   Apparently, it's private.

Josiebug, I remember when I first held you, barely ninety minutes old, not even sure how to open your eyes.  You amazed me then.  You astonish me every day since.

Simplicity

Lynn decided to take Marian out for some therapeutic Christmas shopping so she called me to see if I could pick Josie up from school.  It's the kind of call I love to get.  I rearranged a couple of things so that I could leave the library by 2:15.

Josie's school has a pretty slick arrangement for pickup.  The cars snake in a long line around the parking lot, each car with a paper plate hanging from the rearview mirror with the child's pickup number on it.  The kids are all gathered under the portico in front of the school.  As we turn the corner, an aide stands with a wireless microphone and reads the numbers.  This is relayed to the aide standing with the kids who shouts the numbers out and the kids run up to find their car.

Josie sees mine and bursts into a big silly grin.  She gets in and says, "I didn't know you were coming to pick me up, Nonai!" 

"Your Mom and Nonni went Christmas shopping so they asked me to get you.  Here," I hand her my phone.  "Do you want to give your Mom a call so she knows I've got you?"  They chat for a minute or two.

"So," I say.  "What did you think when you saw my car in the pickup line?"

"Awwesommme...." she drawls in her distinctly southern accent, grinning back at me.

My heart is lighter than it has been all day.

 

Finding Moonlight

I wasn't older than 14 when it became clear there were never going to be enough hours in the day for everything I wanted to do.   I was dealing with blisters on my fingers from this new guitar that I talked my sister's boyfriend into giving me $20 to buy; even then there were stacks of books rising around my bed; it was becoming clear that girls were going to require a lot of time; and I was becoming obsessed with the fascination of scratching sentences into cheap notebooks everyday.  Oh, and there was school.

Not much has changed -- the blisters are thick callouses, but I'm not close to making that guitar do whatever I want it to do; the stacks of books & magazines get ever higher; the girls are fewer, but they take up even more time; and it feels like there's more sentences knocking around my brain everyday than I'll ever in my life get a chance to get out.  Oh, and there's libraryland.

This is my only excuse for taking until last night to get to Moonlight on the Mountain.   We managed to get to its previous incarnation, the Moonlight Music Cafe, several times during the few years before it closed in '06.  Always a fabulous experience.  And every time we went we told ourselves we were going to get there more often and then it was closed.

So when the new room opened last spring, we were determined to be better.  Still, it wasn't until last night that we made it.  We were wonderfully rewarded.  First set by Jason Harrod, short break and then a set by the Twangtown Paramours -- all original music, some sweet, some funny, some delicate, some rowdy.  CDs for sale.  Plenty of time to mingle and chat with the performers. 

Go to their websites.  Listen to their samples.  Buy their music.

The new Moonlight is stripped down.  Cash at the door, no food & drink.  A few chairs & tables.  A small stage and what must be one of the finest sound systems in the city.  It's all about the music.  I made some Parisian style ham & camembert baguettes to bring along with a bottle of wine.  The candles on the table made it feel like a chic underground cafe.   How could there be a better way to end a busy week?

So when will we get back?  No promises.  We're coming up against a hectic travel schedule.  We've got all that other stuff to juggle.  But surely, surely, we can be smart enough to find a few hours here and there to bask in the music and Moonlight?

 

Sidewalk Films: Tell Me What's Real

For two people whose first marriages imploded rather messily, hitting the fifteen year mark felt like a real milestone.  It made us happy.

We generally celebrate our anniversary at least twice -- once at the Welcome Reception of the annual MCMLA conference, whenever that happens to be, and once on the actual date.  (In the fifteen years since we got married at that reception, I don't recall that the two dates have ever exactly coincided.)  Given our typical fall travel schedule, as often as not we'll be out of town on the calendar date.  But Lynn always has our wedding champagne flutes in their travel case and we always have a fine time.

This year, the calendar angels were working in our favor.    We were in town, and the annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival was scheduled for the same weekend.  One other year we managed to get down for a day of the festival, but this was the first time we'd be able to go to the whole thing.  So I booked us into the Tutwiler Hotel and we made a celebration of it.

The venues for the films are all within easy walking distance of each other, so with a little ingenuity and careful scheduling, you can get to quite a few.  And we did.  We only saw one that we thought was pretty awful -- I won't mention it by name (bless it's heart).   We saw a couple that were stunning -- Marwencol was clearly a highpoint for me.  Lynn saw Mars without me and told me that I'd love it.  We were both touched and delighted by The Happy Poet.  There were others that were quite fine.

But for pure fun and silliness, the favorite was Americatown.  It's fast, it's funny, it's shot on location all across the country, and it's got just enough of a touch of seriousness to leaven all of that silliness.   It was joy to watch.

As someone who actually knows very little about film, one of my favorite things about the festival is that there is almost always someone associated with the film attending, and they'll do a bit of Q&A with the audience after the screening.  I learned quite a bit from those.  My very favorite Q&A moment, though, came after Americatown.   Cory Howard, who plays Roosevelt Microsoft, took a question from a very young movie fan.  The exchange went like this:

 

Very young kid (6?7?):  All those places that you went – was that all real or was it fake?

CH: Yeah, it was all real, man.  Yeah, we went to all of those places…

VYK:  But that… when you fell through that trap door in the sand….?

CH: (looks stricken)  Oh, man!    You’re so young….  I hate to do this…  (covers eyes briefly with forearm)  But that…  Well – look – you’re going to see a lot of movies from here on out, and I’ve got to be honest…  It’s ALL fake.  But there’s lots of real stuff out there, too!  You gotta get into that – there’s the trees & hills…  and, um, there’s Santa Claus…  and there’s, oh yeah, there’s insects, man!  Get into insects, they are so amazing!

VYK: (inaudible)

CH:  What’s that?  (puts hand to ear)

VYK:  There’s SpongeBob!

CH:  Yeah!  There’s SpongeBob!  He’s real.  He’s hard to find, down there on the bottom of the ocean, though.  But yeah….

 

Reality is where you find it.  We found quite a bit of it in downtown Birmingham that weekend.

 

I Didn't Have Lemons

As I was getting my stuff out of the trunk I didn't have the grasp on my Publix grocery bag that I thought I did and it dropped to the driveway.  A pretty impressive "Crunch".  The eggs had been carefully packed at the bottom.  I'd been so pleased with the way the young woman at checkout had done that.

Sure enough.  Only one of the twelve was still whole.

No matter.  I hadn't decided what to have for lunch anyway.  I managed to get most of the remaining eleven eggs into a mixing bowl, with a minimum of bits of shell.  Lynn beat them lightly and took out the equivalent of two or three for her baking needs later this afternoon.  I went to my study to have a bloody mary and read the paper while the eggs came up to room temperature.

I suppose I ended up with the equivalent of six or seven eggs.  I fried three pieces of bacon, crisp.  There were three scallions in the bottom vegetable drawer, so I peeled off the decaying leaves and chopped the rest.  I'd picked up a basket of mixed hot peppers at the farmer's market, so I selected a long, pretty, thin red one and halved it lengthwise, scooped out about half the seeds and sliced it thin.

When the bacon was done, I put the slices on a paper towel and put the scallion & pepper into the bacon fat to cook for about a minute and a half -- just long enough for their scents to fill the kitchen and to hear them sizzle.  At least half the pleasure of cooking is the scents & sounds.

I poured a bit of milk into the eggs and then grated in maybe a quarter to a half cup of parmigiano-reggiano and beat that fairly well.  A bit of salt & pepper.  Then stirred in the crumbled bacon and the scallion/pepper mix.  I added a tablespoon or two of butter to the fat remaining in the skillet and put it on medium heat, and then poured the egg mixture in.  While it started to cook, I took one of the small tomatoes from the farmer's market and sliced that thin.  When the frittata was about half set, I placed the rounds of tomato on the top, pushing them in slightly so that the tops of the tomato slices were even with the top of the egg stuff.  A slight grate of pepper on top of each tomato slice and then one more light dusting of grated cheese.

(Should I mention at this point that I'm making it all up as I go along?  It's jazz.  You get the feel and you just kinda know what ought to work next.  Usually, it does).

Kept that cooking until there was just a little pool of uncooked eggs in the center (you test it by jiggling the pan every now and then and seeing what the egg does).  In the meantime, I had the oven broiler going.  I moved the pan into the oven, under the broiler, checking it every fifteen seconds or so until it was beautifully browned.  It just takes a minute or two.  Took it out and slid it onto one of those fine little platters that Lynn made forty years ago, that we still use regularly.

"Fresh herbs?" says Lynn. 

"Yeah, I was thinking about that, but if we're gonna do it, we need 'em quick." 

She went flying out the door, came back with a stalk of basil and a bunch of oregano.  "You do the basil, I'll chop the oregano."  We scattered the herbs half on half and let them sit for a minute or two so the heat from the frittata would wilt them, ever so slightly.

Yes, it was fabulous.  Yes, I know that the thing to do would've been to take a picture and post it here.  That's what people do nowadays, don't they?  I'm just not that into the picture taking thing.

Trust me.  It was gorgeous.