On Cleaning, Or, The Influence of Mothers

It’s a parent thing. I tried to realize that and act otherwise, to no avail. There I was, scrubbing the kitchen floor with my last paper towel.

I was leaving this apartment in a matter of hours. It had been my home for my last graduate school semester, and while it had seen a few good times, it certainly wasn’t a cesspool. Yet here I was, scrubbing.

When I was a kid, my mother instituted a range of housecleaning general orders for her six children. There was the “Quick Pick”: A swift, certain swipe of loose toys and dirty counters that created a house presentable for visitors just about to call. There was the “Deep Clean”: That onerous lineup of dusting, vacuuming and scrubbing that resulted in a cleancleanCLEAN house.

But move-out cleaning was the worst of all. A floor to ceiling scrub to leave house better than we found it. Deposit return? All but guaranteed. Yet I suspect the clean-out was less about the landlord and more about my mother.

Why did she clean so? Why must I?

So here I knelt, scrubbing the floorboards.

“It’s just fine, you know,” said a friend who stopped by to give me more paper towels and help scrub the last of the floors, looking at me as if I was crazy.

Yes, but . . .

The apartment manager arrived, his shiny teeth proving that, yes, soon-to-be dentist show off their own product.

“Spotless,” he announced, writing the word on the sign-out form.

Thanks, mom.

 

Friends, Parachutes and Missiles

Patterson's 50th class. I'm on the right, not knowing anyone standing around me. This is no longer true.

In August 2009, I met several dozen new people who like me had parachuted into Lexington, Kentucky to study at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

I remember staring at the faces, jostling among them as we stood for the new class photo, and wondering if I would ever get to know them better.

I did. Much better. Some, arguably, too much.

With all due respect to the program and my professors, this group is why I went to Kentucky. Yes, I wanted a piece of paper declaring me a Master in something. But what I wanted, what I needed was to meet people from the world outside my established networks that often seemed to inhabit South Dakota and Minnesota with a small Egyptian wing.

I wasn’t looking to cynically network, although I’m well aware of the value of friends to my professional life thus far. I was, however, looking for new friends, with new experiences, who could challenge me and force me to measure up.

I didn’t expect to forge the friendships I did. I’ve got people now, people for whom I would do nearly anything. People I’ve held while they cried, and people who marveled me with their wit and intelligence, people who sharpened my skills until my arguments drew blood.

I’m humbled to have met them all, and I’m honored to call them my friends.

Now most of us have left Lexington, shot out into our futures like missiles. If my past experiences with true friends holds true, we’ll meet again.

The graduating class. Mapping the invisible connections between these people would make for a dense diagram.

What’s next: Wyoming, my new home

In the words of “Man of Constant Sorrow“:

I am the man of constant sorrow/
I’ve seen trouble all my days/
I bid farewell to ol’ Kentucky/
The place where I was born and raised.

Okay, I wasn’t born and raised here, but you get the point. I’m leaving Kentucky.

I’m Wyoming-bound.

I’ve accepted a job as the energy reporter at the Casper Star-Tribune. This is no small job. Despite the cowboy imagery, Wyoming is first and foremost an energy state. Wyoming is the number one US coal-producing state, producing 40 percent of US coal.  It’s a top producer of natural gas and ahead of many other states in wind energy production. A Russian firm is mining uranium there and an Israeli firm is breaking new ground on geothermal energy.

It’s also home to the highest rates of workplace fatalities in the nation. And, as you can imagine, the energy firm and interests in the state exert a powerful influence on the affairs of the state.

This is a recipe for a difficult and challenging beat. I’ll be writing stories of both international, national, and hyper-local interest. Those stories are highly unlikely to make everyone happy. That’s not unusual in journalism, but as the sole energy reporter in a state where energy is life, this job is going to be craaazy.

Yet that’s why I took this job. I intend to show up, listen a lot, talk to a lot of people, see as much as I can, and then crank out some damn fine journalism.

As the old cowboy ballad goes:

Whoop-ee-ti-yi-o get along little doggies,
It’s your misfortune and not of my own.
Whoop-ee-ti-yi-o get along little doggies,
You know that Wyoming will be your new home.

On Death, the Value of Life, and My Job

I read a book this summer that changed my life. Or, perhaps more accurately, it narrowed my life focus in a way I could finally understand and describe. The book? Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. For a month, it held my bed up in Yemen. Then I pulled it out and read it, day after day, by sunlight, electric lightbulb and headlamp when blackouts swept across Sana’a.

For its hundreds of pages chronicling Middle East history and Fisk’s work as a reporter there, my takeaway message was this: Life is precious, and those who hold life cheap must be unveiled, questioned, and called to account. Those for whom life is expendable must be held to a high standard before and after they spend lives.

These truths deeply resonated within me, and forced me to ask myself what came next. How do I do these things? My answer, as I worked it out this summer, is two-fold: I must tell the truth of lives lost, and make expensive the taking of life.

To tell the truth is to, quite simply, show what humans have done to their fellows: The brutality and defilement and murder. I must not shy away from the gore and terror. I must build structures that allow others to tell the truth and strengthen and protect such structures now in place.

To make expensive the taking of life is to raise the financial, legal and moral costs for those who would end a life. This can be done from the outside but is more likely to occur if done within the structure or next to the one who would end a life. This requires I gain a deep knowledge of those structures, a deep understanding of the decision-makers, and always look for ways to sway the structure or individual away from the taking of life. This requires all the tools of persuasion. I must gain those tools.

This dual-pronged approach now drives me as I look for jobs. I’m searching for jobs in which I tell the truth about what humans do to one another. I’m also searching for jobs where I can learn the structures and people who take lives, learn how to influence them, and gain the tools to accomplish that goal.

This is not to say I believe no lives should never end, or that I will give everything I value, even my own life, to stop the ending of a life. I think there is a time and a place for death. I think that decision should never be easy, it should never come without costs, and must be made very carefully. I think those that hold life cheap should be held to account in all circumstances and their deeds described and condemned.

The choice to tell the truth is always right, from within or without, but truth-telling is often and easily ignored. Working from within: I think, if I’m in the right place with this, I will never truly know if a choice for death was right. Either way, from within or without, Clearly these are not easy paths filled with easy decisions.

Yet I welcome them. Setting and holding a value to life is the mission of a lifetime.

Picking A Team: Why Nomads Can’t Be Sports Fans

Throw a dart, pick a team?

It’s hard to be a fan.

Hey, it’s easy, you say. Pick the team your family loves.

But what if they don’t? What if they don’t really care?

Go back to where you’re from, you say.

I was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Should I support the Packers or the Lions? I’ve lived for a substantial amount of time in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Washington and Kentucky. Timberwolves? Seahawks? Bengals? Twins? The formerly Minnesotan Dallas Stars?

You build up love for a team over time, you say.

Yet I never really cared about basketball. Baseball is another story. I remember staying awake, listening to the Minnesota Twins Radio Network on a radio in bed in 1991 as the Twins push through to the World Series. I got the family to watch it on TV and suddenly the players in my head were real on the screen.

Less than a year later I convinced my parents (for the low, low price of no commercials) to let me watch the 1992 Super Bowl between the Washington Redskins and the Buffalo Bills. I knew nothing about football or NFL teams, but it felt like it was something I needed to do.

I was a Vikings fan, for a time. I married one in 1999, and it seemed like the right thing to do. After we got divorced in 2003, I didn’t want to be a Vikings fan anymore.

I fell in love with the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 World Series — the year of Yankees defeat, pine tar helmets, Boston anthems and Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. It felt natural to hate the Yankees. Then all the players I loved left the team, and the Red Sox cap I bought seemed false. I have it still, and it’s been to a dozen countries, but does that make me a Red Sox fan?

Just pick one, you say.

I finally just picked the Green Bay Packers. where I was born in Michigan’s UP is a solid sector of Packers Nation, and I liked their out-in-the-woods, cold weather quality. There’s something about the Northwoods that feels home to me, whether it’s in Minnesota, Michigan or Wisconsin. I’ve been a fan for four years.

By that thinking, I also picked the Minnesota Twins as my baseball team, right? They’re from Minnesota, I listened to them as a boy, and I like their workmanlike attitude. I’ve  been a fan for less than a year.

But what kind of fan does that make me?

Kentucky, For a Moment

Keeneland . . . around the bend, on to the end.

Last year I planned to do Kentucky right. I knew I was going to be in the state for a year-and-a-half (a whole year-and-a-half!), and I planned to see all the sites, to smell the smells and visit the restaurants and hit up all the cultural events. I had until next December, right? I had plenty of time.

Now, here I am, two months from the day I’ll leave Kentucky. Have a I done it right?

I’ve hiked Red River Gorge, wandered around Henry Clay’s estate of Ashland, gone to the Keeneland racing track/social event, wandered around downtown during the equestrian games, cheered myself hoarse at a Wildcat basketball game, bought Mad Mushroom pizza and ate it while I walked down Broadway to my home.

So much, yet so little.

Just one more stop on the whistlestop tour that is my life, destination: unknown.

Egypt taught me to not say goodbye or act as if I would never be back. Instead, I’ve learned to touch and remember, to smell and remember, to hear and see and tuck those memories away.

I could still tell you how that handmade vase in Yemen felt, I could still describe the smell of the narrow street just to the west of Cairo’s Bab al Louk market. I could tell you how the Dead Sea tastes and describe the flap of pigeon wings in front of a statute of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan.

Soon I must take my sensory memories of this place and tuck them away for later, when its time to tell stories of the past.

But for now, I prepare for the next stop.