Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
The Blocked Drainage Pipe
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/01/2014 - 21:06Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Another restless rainy night passes. It is foggy this morning, and I’m thinking about putting together a medley on Spotify of songs about wind and rain. Yet it was a busy day and I headed off to the long list of tasks in front of me. In the afternoon, the rain broke and it turned warm and sunny, feeling almost like summer.
Like many months, I’m starting off this one with the childhood invocation for good luck. April started off pretty sparse, but I’ve been managing to post more frequently recently. May is looking like a very busy month, with political conventions and various activities related to health advocacy. We’ll see if I can keep up my blogging. I’ll certainly have plenty to blog about.
When I got home this evening, I found the runoff from the rain washing out parts of the yard. I poked around and found the entrance to a drainage pipe that had been clogged by leaves. After clearing this, the water started draining much more nicely and the backed up water began to subside.
There’s probably a metaphor there, but I’m too tired to look for it.
Daddy's Girl
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/30/2014 - 19:52The clock radio awakened me from a disturbed sleep, and I stumbled towards the kitchen to make my daily oatmeal. I glanced in on my youngest daughter. She was fast asleep, sprawled out on her bed next to piles of stuffed animals beneath the posters of Dr. Who and puppy dogs.
They had predicted heavy rain, and the storm may have added to my restlessness, but it had never gotten severe, and we had gotten was very far from the devastating storms in the south.
With my bowl of warm oatmeal, I sat down to see what was going on in my friends’ lives. The first post hit me square between the eyes. “Daddy is gone.”
A story I had been following closely for two months had another big development. I had met Aliza several years earlier in Second Life and we stayed in touch on various social media sites. At one point, over the past few weeks, she asked for prayers for her father, and when people asked for his name, she said it was Myron.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else with the name Myron, but it jumped out at me, because it is my middle name. Now, Aliza’s dad, Myron, is gone. I read back through her journey of the past few months. I looked at the Throwback Thursday pictures of her and her father that she had posted, the view from her father’s hospital room. Aliza’s most recent post says, “I love you so much, Daddy. You always were and always will be my hero.” Bette Midler singing, “Wind Beneath My Wings” plays in my mind.
My family was never all that close. After my mother died, it has been my sister who has worked hardest to keep us all connected. A few months ago, my father turned 84 and right below Aliza’s post was my sister’s post about the independent senior living community she had found for my father. Perhaps 84 is the new 64.
This evening, as I write this blog post, my youngest daughter is taking a shower and I hear her singing along to one of her favorite songs. I glance at an end table with pictures of my two older daughters. One is now in Japan and the other is in Boston.
It’s still raining outside. Soon, I’ll go to bed, and tomorrow, the clock radio will awaken me to another bowl of oatmeal.
This is Blood
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/28/2014 - 06:25At work, I mentor young adults interested in health care and social media and I often talk about understanding your audience. Often, the people I work with have fairly narrow views of life and the people around them. So, I find different videos to help them gain a little perspective. One of my favorites is This is Water from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. He starts off with
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
He goes on to talk about the banal tedium of daily life and suggests the following:
I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
It is up to us, what we do with life around us.
I had shown this video to some coworkers one Thursday, before heading out to a dinner at church.
It was a Thursday evening and I stopped in the basement of Grace and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Hamden, CT. The basement is like many church basements. The ceiling is covered with square foot sized tiles with lots of little holes in them; the kind I remember from my childhood, and probably even older. I can’t say that I remember the walls, but it seems like they are cinderblocks painted with some bland industrial color, perhaps from the 50s.
This is the room where Alcoholics Anonymous have meetings many evenings. There are hand written instructions near the giant coffee percolators and trash cans. On Friday nights, there is Dinner for a Dollar. It is an inexpensive home cooked meal where people contribute what they can, typically a dollar; sometimes more, sometimes nothing at all. People of all walks of life gather, chat and have a nourishing meal.
But Thursday night was Maundy Thursday. I had just gotten through rehearsing with a small pickup choir that would be doing Tallis’ Lamentation of Jeremiah on Good Friday. My youngest daughter was with me, talking blithely with those around her.
I sat quietly, considering the walks, the ceiling, the lives of people who have passed through this space. I thought of people who perhaps first started worship at Grace and St. Peter’s after attending an AA meeting in the basement, or having a nice home cooked meal when they were down on their luck and between jobs.
As we shared the supper and listened to the story of Maundy Thursday, it struck me. David Foster Wallace had told students about finding meaning in the tedium of daily modern existence. “This is water”.
The words of consecration, “this is my blood”. I thought of people struggling with addiction, struggling to make ends meet after losing a job. I thought of people that we pray for, week after week, fighting some illness. I thought of those close to me struggling with one calamity or another. I thought of monks I had met at monasteries, who had taken vows of silence, eating their simple meals. I thought of my own failings.
David Foster Wallace’s words mixed with Jesus’: “This is blood.” This is going beyond just “considering that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am”. It is recognizing that when you get right down to it, we are all the same, we are all connected, and that the Blood of Christ helps us transcend the tedium and empowers us to not only consider those around us, but to connect with and help them.
Around the state, I figured that friends of mine would be at similar dinners. They would have different ways of remembering, of celebrating, of talking about being ‘washed in the blood’, and that too, reflected our connection.
David Foster Wallace ends off his commencement speech with
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
To which, I add, and “This is blood”
Catching Up
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/26/2014 - 08:43Another month has flown by, with almost no time to write, so my list of blog posts to write has gotten much longer. One of the things I’m doing at work is teaching elementary school kids how to design and print 3D objects. I probably have about three 3D printing posts I need to write; one on Tinkercad, one on advanced options, and one on working with the kids.
I’m also getting Samsung Gear 2 watch at work. I’m excited because it uses the Tizen operating system. I’ve started looking at developing on that platform, so there is another blog post or two that needs to be written there.
There were several events over the past month that need to be written about. I’m really want to write a blog post about Maundy Thursday, relating it to the great This is Water commencement speech. I went up to Podcamp on Saturday, and there is lots I should write about this, especially as it relates to the social constructs of teaching social media to digital natives. And, there is the 50th Anniversary of the World’s Fair in Flushing Queens. I hope to weave in Ingress and period pieces.
For both of these last two events, there are lots of photos as well, and I’m trying to organize my photos much better. Between autosyncing to platforms like Dropbox, Google+, Facebook and Flickr, running low on space on certain platforms and devices, separating work and personal photos, and having large archives, there is a lot of work to be done.
May and June are looking perhaps even busier. I used to keep an Upcoming Events section on my blog. Perhaps I’ll revive that as I plan for the coming months.
But first, I need to get on with my day. Fiona is going to go hear the Forresters at the Daffodil Festival in Meriden. I hope to get back in time to make a dump run, and then we’ll see what other writing I can get done.
Lamentations and The Heights
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/13/2014 - 08:34Incipit lamentacio Jeremiae prophetae
Thus begins Thomas Tallis’ The Lamentation of Jeremiah, a piece we will be singing at church on Good Friday. In has been ringing through my mind the past few days. Today is my mother’s birthday. I would always call her up and talk with her on this day, and on my birthday, I would always get a card from her. Over the years, her beautiful cursive script slowly degenerated and became harder to read as the essential tremors became more powerful.
Last week was public health week and I went to a few health care related events. On Friday was the CT Health Foundation fellows spring retreat and the discussion was about health equity. From there, I rushed home to join Kim and Fiona in heading to the Amity High School production of “In The Heights”. As with all the Amity productions, it was amazing.
The musical was set in Washington Heights as immigrants to our country struggled to get ahead. By and large, I suspect most of the cast of “In The Heights” come from families that came to this country less recently and have gotten much further ahead than the characters they played.
I suspect that most of the students will go on to college or the careers of their choices without the struggles that Nina faced returning to the Heights as the shining student who managed to go to college and then struggled to keep up with the more privileged crew.
The winning lottery ticket and the death of Abuela Claudia struck home for me as I mourn my mother’s death and work on settling her estate. How can my siblings and I do something meaningful with our inheritance?
I remember my days in elementary school when my mother would come in and help. These days, when I write of my mother classmates of talk about how much they liked her, how kind she was. She didn’t come to Williamstown from the farms of Puerto Rico. She came from a farm in Northfield, MA. Of course, growing up, I always assumed that this was the family farm, land my grandfather had owned and had been passed down to him. In fact, someone else owned the land and my grandfather was a worker on the land. Although my ancestors have been in this country for generations, I am perhaps much closer to the new families in the Heights than I realized.
Like Nina, I was a good student, and headed off to college with much fanfare, although in my case it was amidst difficulties at home up on the hill in Williamstown and feeling somewhat of an outcast at school in my hand me down clothes. School musicals were one of those special times to be part of something bigger, part of the school community, and even though I always played bit parts at best, I loved the musicals.
Now, the curtain has come down. We move from public health week, to Holy Week. At church today, we will read The Passion. We will join with the crowds welcoming Jesus to Jerusalem. Shouting Hosanna, Save us, and then change our tune to Crucify Him as The Passion unfolds. I’m rarely one to go with the crowds so this part of The Passion feels less familiar to me. Instead, I find Peter’s denial much more resonant. Loyal, yet clueless the promise to never deny Jesus, and then denying him three times. I’ve done that way too many times.
convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum
