Archive - 2011
November 13th
The Experimental Memoir Day 13, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/13/2011 - 21:16People have always commented on my ability to remember things. I’ve often been asked if I have a photographic memory. I don’t believe I do. My memories seem to be much more in the form of thoughts put together into words. When I was younger, I used to feel uncomfortable with these questions and jokingly reply, no, I’ve got a photogenic memory, or at least that is what the brain surgeon always said.
I’ve been in plays, and had problems memorizing my lines. This sort of memory has seemed challenging to me. I have done okay with sort term memories, like trying to remember some number for a short period of time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that memories from high school have largely escaped me. I remember vague outlines of high school, but I’ve been surprised with things that my high school classmates that I’ve reconnected with on Facebook so many years later remember. Yet at the same time, someone describes something, or posts a picture and unexpected memories come flowing back. My memories of college are a bit less vague, with some memories being very clear. Different parts of my adult life are easier or harder to remember.
All of this has been occupying my thinking a bit recently. This writing is all about remembering. I’ve managed to remember my meals for the past several days. Yet on Friday, I forgot my coffee, leaving my travelling mug on the counter. In the evening, I forgot to bring home the charger for my laptop. As I work on my writing, I find it difficult, from time to time, to remember specific events I want to write about.
My grandfather had Parkinson’s disease, and my aunt recently succumbed to the same disease. On the other side of the family, an uncle passed away about a year ago after struggling for some time with Alzheimer’s disease.
Kim’s grandfather passed away a couple years after Kim and I married after his struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. I have to wonder, and I destined for some disease that will rob me of my memory? Are the momentary lapses, like forgetting my coffee a precursor of something to come? What role might these writings, as well as the weekly radio show I do with Fiona play in my old age, reminding me of a long ago forgotten era?
For that matter, how does my ability to remember really compare with other people? How much detail do others remember? Do I remember more or less than average? My memories; are they in a similar form or a different form from those around me?
I remember when I was in junior high school. Everything I looked at seemed soft. There weren’t clear boundaries between things. I had to hold books close to my face to be able to make out the letters. It never occurred to me that that wasn’t how other people saw things, until someone, noticing how closely I held books to my face, suggested I should have my eyes tested. Yes, in fact, I was near sighted.
I got glasses, and all of a sudden, things started looking very different. Yet what was the ‘real’ image? The way I saw things without my glasses? The way I saw things with my glasses? Perhaps something completely different, such as the say others saw things? It led me to think about other things. We all agreed on what we considered the color ‘red’. But the sensations that I experience when I see something we agree to call red, are they the same sensations that others have when they see something we agree to call red? How about when we experience something wet, or cold, or hard?
Perhaps all of this led to my eventually studying philosophy in college, and finding Empiricism and ultimately Solipsism so intriguing.
The Experimental Memoir Day 13
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/13/2011 - 15:13Friday was Veterans’ Day. Kim and Fiona both had the day off, but I had to work. It wasn’t a day off for Wesley, who came upstairs at 5:30 in the morning seeking attention. I took him outside, and then sat down to my morning ritual a little bit earlier than normally. It was all the more tiring because I had been up late the night before for a conference I was speaking at in Hartford.
Although Fiona had the day off, she also ended up getting up earlier than usual. She fed Wesley, but then asked me to take him for a walk as I was trying to get out the door. In the end, she came outside with him as I tried to get on the road for work.
Since Kim had the day off, I was going to drive the grey Prius. It gets better mileage and had more gas in the tank. I had to move my parking sticker from the black car to the grey car. My hands were full and it was frustrating. When I finally got going, I realized I had left my travelling mug full of coffee on the kitchen counter.
Like most mornings, I head out the gravel section of our driveway to the blacktopped section that is a shared driveway for several houses. I head down the little hill, and take a left onto the state highway. There is often a lot of traffic on the street as I head off to work, and I have to wait for a break in the traffic.
Friday morning, the traffic was a little lighter. I continue down the hill and drive under the old parkway bridge. Construction on the parkway started in the 1930s, and it is a grand old road. The underpass is a beautiful stone arch that probably is too often overlooked by people driving in or out of New Haven.
After passing under the parkway, I take a left onto a side street in New Haven. I would guess that many of the houses I pass on these side streets were probably built in boom after World War II. However, there are a few houses that appear older scatter amongst these houses. With the housing crisis of the past few years, there have been sporadic signs announcing bankruptcy auctions.
I pass a small Orthodox Church, and enter a business section of New Haven. There is a gauntlet of intersections I need to negotiate to get onto the Parkway just before the Heroes Tunnel passing through West Rock.
Once I emerge from the tunnel, I set the cruise control on in the car at a comfortable 60 miles per hour. That is five miles above the speed limit, slower than must traffic, but not slow enough to be a hazard. I settle in for the ride. Typically, I start drinking my coffee once I leave the tunnel, and I listen to some morning news. At times, my mind wanders as I think about the day ahead or of various things I need to get written.
On Friday, I didn’t have my coffee, but I listened to the radio, the endless patter of news. Much of the news blends together; the debt crisis in Greece and the debt crisis in Italy, the latest political debates, and random other bits of information.
When I was in college, I took an aesthetics course. I remember the professor talking about people who run through museums. They glance at one famous painting after another, checking them off on some bucket list, but never really taking the time to engage with the painting. I remember how he some about how people often go through life this way, that perhaps we are all museum runners. In a different course, something about religious experiences, he spoke about how many people rotely say The Lord’s Prayer, and various other religious texts, and about meeting a mystic who focused on each word, trying to be fully aware of it.
The parkway, even though it is one of the nicer highways around, is one that slips by too quickly and too easily. There is a section where a greenway walking path is being developed. Another area has an old dilapidated barn standing next to a field looking as if it should be in Vermont, and not in Connecticut. Beyond that, it is an uninspiring drive.
In Meriden, the parkway intersects with a couple Interstates. I could take a turn on to a town street and head a little more directly to work. However, that is normally a bit slower. If I see a traffic jam ahead as I leave the parkway, I head over these town streets. Otherwise, I take the slightly more convoluted but more reliable highways.
Soon, I start hitting sections of road that are a little more picturesque. On my left, I pass a reservoir. It is surrounded by woods. There have been mornings that I’ve seen various forms of wildlife swimming in the reservoir. Often water foul, but various mammals as well.
At times, the water is perfectly still, forming a natural mirror, reflecting the trees around it. Other times, the breezes make little ripples changing the reflection to an impressionist painting. Sometimes there is a mist rising from the water.
I try to make a conscious effort to draw in the beauty of the moment as I drive to work. It makes me think of driving up Route 6 at the tip of Cape Cod on the way from the campground up to the Race Point beach where we spend many summer hours.
There are other moments along the road, as I notice the different plants. Now that it is November, most of the plants have withered and turned brown, but at other times of the year, there are dandelion in profusions of yellow, blue chicory, white and purple clover and various colors of vetch. Later in the year, the sumac berries start to turn red against its green foliage background.
I grew up in a family that foraged wild food, and I think of chicory coffee, sucking the sweet nectar from the ends of the clover flowers, eating dandelion greens, which always seemed a bit bitter, or having lemonade seasoned with sumac berries.
I still drive the road too much like a museum runner, and don’t take enough time to soak in all that the road has to offer. After all, it is part of the daily commute. After the brief bucolic interlude, the road comes down into the outskirts of Middletown, an area dominated by strip malls. It is in this area, where I stop and get gas when I need it.
Then, on into the middle of Middletown. I pass the Wesleyan campus. I grew up in a college town and loved it. There were so many great activities to participate in. I go to a few things at Wesleyan from time to time, but not enough. The same applies to Yale which is close to where I live.
Then, I drove down Washington Street and turn onto Main Street and I am almost at work.
Besides not fully experiencing my commute each day, there are times that I just simply forget what I saw. As I work on writing this, my tendency to forget things like this comes to mind. What did I have for dinner on Thursday evening? Actually, this week’s meals have been fairly easy to remember.
Friday night, I was exhausted after my long week. Kim made sandwiches of Italian Sausage, peppers, and cheese. Fiona ate at our neighbor’s house. Growing up, sandwiches were normally simple things. A slice of bologna on some bread with a little mustard spread on it, or maybe a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Kim grew up I in a family where sandwich making was an art form, with a collection of different meats, cheeses, and condiments.
Thursday night was the conference I spoke at. I had heavy hors d’oeuvres. Mostly it was Chinese dumplings, some chicken, some pork, as well as some stuffed bread. I had a beer with these hors d’oeuvres as I chatted with fellow panelists and attendees of the conference.
Wednesday night was just Fiona and I. Kim had an evening meeting so I ordered some pizza. We got two small pizzas, one plain cheese and the other with sausage. Tuesday night was another non-standard night. Wesley had been injured and there wasn’t really any focus on dinner. In the end, we had some fried ravioli and some kielbasa as we sat in the living room and tended to Wesley.
It is an interesting exercise to see what you can remember from the previous week’s dinners. The other thing that stands out is that from Tuesday through Friday, we did not sit together as a family at the dinner table. Saturday, Kim’s cousin was house sitting for her parents and Kim’s brother came down to visit and we all sat down together as an extended family for a wonderful dinner of leg of lamb and potatoes.
This extended family dinner had the trappings of so many extended family dinners. The adults sat at the dining room table and the kids sat at the kids table in the kitchen. The discussions were lively and everyone seemed to have a great time.
November 12th
The Experimental Memoir Day 12, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/12/2011 - 15:01The Chamber of Commerce meetings almost feel like they come out of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. They feel like they are dominated by upstanding older white men; perhaps not the captains of industry, but the lieutenants of local commerce. They are sincere well meaning supporters of the businesses in their local communities. They gather approximately monthly, for a breakfast in the ballroom of a large hotel near the interstate.
The breakfasts are better then many breakfasts that I’ve often had at conferences. They do run into the problem of having to be produced in bulk. The breakfasts are served buffet style. There are two long sets of tables running down a hallway. At one end of each set of tables are large piles of full sized white plates. These are followed by several large silver chaffing dishes full of various foods. One dish is full of light fluffy scrambled eggs. I’ve often wondered how these eggs are prepared. Are they made from a powered and whipped up and served? Does someone in the back actually crack hundreds of eggs open and pour the raw eggs into some giant bowl where they get beaten by an industrial sized mixer, and then poured on a grill to cook? They seem too uniform, too unvarying to be cooked this way.
The next chaffing dishes are filled with bacon and sausage. Years ago I worked at a summer camp with giant camp stoves. I remember food cooking on the large grills and imagine the rows of bacon and sausage spread out on the grill tops in the hotel’s kitchen. Some conference centers seem to get overwhelmed by the crowds and the need to prepare massive amounts of food over a quick period, and the bacon and sausage isn’t always cooked as much as I would like. I always worry about under cooked bacon and sausage. However, the bacon and sausage in the chaffing dishes at the chamber of commerce breakfasts are usually cooked properly.
Also on the tables are platters of muffins and Danish. This is a staple of many a conference breakfast. Yet too often, they have been stale, as if they sat on a table the day before for some other conference breakfast. Again, this has not been the case at the Chamber of Commerce breakfasts. Likewise, the juice, typically orange juice, grapefruit juice, and often some other juice, perhaps apple, tomato or grape juice, adorns the end of the table. At most conferences, the juice seems to be a safe bet.
Other conferences I attend often have packed food of one sort or another on the tables, although this is more common for a mid morning break. Sometimes there are small containers of individual serving of yoghurt or individually wrapped breakfast bars. These are normally safe but make the conferences feel a little more generic. At a conference at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, there were unique ideas presented. One was of mixed nuts in shot glasses. Another was yoghurt with granola sprinkled on top in similar shot glasses. At times, they provided vegetables with some sort of dipping in similar glasses. All of which seemed much healthier and much more interesting.
As I gathered my food, I spoke with various members of the chamber. It was election day, and many sported little “I have voted” stickers on their jackets. I talked with them about how the voter turnout seemed to be going. Most said that turnout seemed light. Of course, it was early in the morning, and turnout is usually heavier at the end of the day. In addition, many areas were still recovering from a week without power, and some people may have been less inclined to get up early to vote.
I don’t know how many people in the chamber also hold elected office, but I suspect there is a good overlap and I wished one mayoral candidate that I recognized good luck at the breakfast. However, he ended up getting defeated at the end of the day.
One of the big issues in Middletown was about students voting. I remember when I was in college, registering to vote in the town I was attending college. I spent the most part of four years of my life in that college town. I ate there, in the college cafeteria as well as going into town to eat at local restaurants. I attended church there. In fact, with my interest in the varieties of religious experiences, I attended several different churches. I was involved in various civic activities in town. I don’t know who much most Wesleyan students get involved in the town they live in for four years, but for that matter, I don’t know how much people who live in Middletown get involved in their town either.
There were several articles in the town newspapers about whether or not students should be allowed to vote in the town they were residing in, so much so that at least one of the State Representatives and the Secretary of State weighed in, and local elected officials quickly corrected themselves in the local papers, only to then go on and make other misstatements about the voting process.
One person I ran into at the Chamber of Commerce worked at Wesleyan. He had voted already and was actively working to get the college students out to vote. I talked about the issue of the college kids voting in three different districts and pondered whether or not there were efforts to dilute the college student vote by splitting the university into three different districts. The time to redistrict is coming up soon, and we talked about whether or not the current districting should be challenged.
There are the normal traditional trappings to a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, the Pledge of Allegiance, the announcements and introductions. Depending on your perspective, it can be comforting and reassuring; things are proceeding the way they should be, even if there have been disruptions to the economy, to the power system, or simply to our sense of how things should be. To some, it can be monotonous; the same thing repeated meaninglessly and without feeling, month after month. To others it can be disconcerting; traditions propping up an old order of things that needs shaking up. Though I suspect that for most of the loyal attendees of Chamber of Commerce breakfasts, it is comforting and reassuring.
This month’s breakfast, falling a few days before Veteran’s day, was focused on the men and women that have served our country in uniform. Before the breakfast started, a local chorale performed patriotic pieces. The Governor’s Foot Guard was there to present the colors, and performed with the full pomp that has accompanied them for centuries. As an old bagpiper, I enjoyed hearing the pipes played as part of the ceremony.
Various veterans were recognized, including a World War II veteran wearing his uniform from over half a century ago. It was touching, but the words of “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” came to my mind
And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, "What are they marching for?"
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all
The keynote speaker answered the question, talking about how he had served in Vietnam and come home to find no crowds waiting to cheer him and his men and how he has vowed not to let that happen again. Yet he spoke with a decidedly political twist, talking about how important it is that the United States honor its commitments to the men and women that served in uniform. He spoke about making sure that we provided jobs for our veterans, and health and retirement benefits. He ended off with a touching story of a Vietnam veteran, recognized with a medal of honor, who was killed when he tried to rob a liquor store to get enough money to pay for medical coverage for his wife who was hemorrhaging as the result of a miscarriage. He ended his speech, which he gave without notes, perhaps because he has given it so many times before, to a standing ovation.
The story seemed so compelling that I thought it would be easy to find on the internet. I searched out the story and found a different version. The veteran had been killed in a liquor store robbery, but there was no mention of a wife hemorrhaging from a miscarriage and being denied medical treatment. Instead, the story was about a veteran who most likely had PTSD and had snapped. With any story, there is always more to it than is reported, and I wonder what the real story was, but without definitive sources, I didn’t link to it.
Whatever the story, the Chamber of Commerce meeting felt like it came right out of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, from a day before Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. The men were sincere and well meaning, and while I felt a bit like an interloper from a different world, I have to respect their civic engagement and wished that more people from other walks of life were as engaged.
The Experimental Memoir Day 12, Part 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/12/2011 - 13:35A year or so ago, Kim’s father bought her a Nook for her birthday. Kim had always spoken against the e-book readers. She liked the feel of the book in her hands, the small, and the look of a book. Books work nicely in many different levels of light. They don’t stop working when the power fails.
Kim is a voracious reader and around our house are various piles of books Kim has been reading. She makes regular trips to the library to pick up new books, and probably spends more time reading each evening than the average American spends watching television, or geeks like me spend on the Internet.
So, it was interesting to see her reaction. The first thing she did was hand the Nook over to me to set it up, configure it, and give it a test drive. I found it an interesting device. Basically, it is running Android, the operating system on more and more telephones. It had wifi connectivity to download books and a micro USB connection so that you could connect it to the computer. I was concerned that only way to get books for the Nook might be to buy them from Barnes and Noble.
Yet I did a bit of research online and found that we could download books from our public library onto the Nook. Shortly before we got the Nook, we had been camping out on Cape Cod. The first few days were rainy and we stopped at the Truro public library. People who summer on Cape Cod, even if they are merely there for a week in a camping trailer, can get a library card. So, we got a card, and checked out some books and movies for the trailer. Back in Connecticut, I did a little research and found that I could check e-books out of the Truro public library for the Nook as well.
Further research revealed many public libraries we could potentially use, including libraries where my mother lives, my sister lives, and Kim’s brother lives. One library that particularly jumped out at me was the New York City Public Library. Apparently, they have an incredible collection of e-books. We could probably work things out for my brother to check out e-books for us there. The New York City Public Library also has another interesting option. People from around the country can purchase a New York City Public Library card for a hundred bucks. We might do that some year as Kim has now read many of the books from our public library.
Doing more research, I checked out Project Guttenberg. This is a project that has been around for a long time, at least by Internet standards. The goal is to put as many public domain texts on the Internet as possible. There is a related project called LibriVox which is an effort to get these texts read and recorded as Audiobooks. I’ve used these audiobooks from time to time on my cellphone and have even burnt a few to CDs to listen to during long car rides, such as our frequent trips to Cape Cod.
I had downloaded a few ebooks Project Guttenberg to load on an ebook reader on my cellphone. I was glad to find I could do it, although the cell phone was not a great device to read the ebooks. The screen was just too small. Nonetheless, I’ve read a few ebooks on my cellphone. I was pleased to find that I could also load Project Guttenberg books to Kim’s Nook, although I’m not sure how many Project Guttenberg books she has read there.
One book that I read on my cell phone was Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. It talks about the life of George Babbitt, following him through his daily activities, including his boosterism for his local community. It provides and interesting counter point to what I am writing.
Another book that I read several years ago provides another back drop to this week’s stories. In 2000, Robert Putnam wrote a book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. It was based, in part, on an earlier essay he had written, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. It was a book that I first read during Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid. It lamented the decline of civic organizations from the League of Women Voters and Rotary Club to bowling league. An important focus of my activity in the Dean campaign was to help revitalize civic engagement, a task that still needs work today. Social media has changed the nature of our civic involvement and the way we look at social capital, but there is still much more engagement to be encouraged.
All of this provides background to the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce breakfast I attended this week. The health center where I work is one of the sponsors of Middnight on Main, an effort to bring a First Night like New Year’s Eve celebration to Middletown, CT. For the past couple of months I’ve been going to Middlesex Chamber of Commerce events to promote Middnight on Main. At the events, I’ve run into various friends from politics and social media.
I’m not sure what time the breakfasts are supposed to start. I believe it is 7:30 in the morning. However, I’ve always arrived early to help set up the Middnight on Main display and greet people as they arrive. On a normal morning, I leave the house around 7:30, but for the Chamber Breakfasts, I’ve been leaving an hour earlier.
At 6:30, the traffic is lighter, although the sky is darker. The drive may be a little further than my drive to work, but it requires less turns and is highway almost all the way. The breakfast takes place in the ballroom of a large hotel just off the Interstate. When I arrive determines how far I have to walk to the main entrance.
This week, the parking lot was full of the large trucks of the line crews that have been in the state working on restoring power after the October snow storm. I walked into the hotel along with others arriving early, and found a couple of my coworkers already there and the display nicely set up. I chatted with others that have been working on Middnight on Main and handed out brochures.
For swag, we’ve been handling out small clear bouncy balls. Inside is fluid filled with some sort of sparking glitter that floats around much like the snow in a snow globe. In the middle is a small electrical device made of a battery, a couple LEDs, one red and one blue, that start to flash when the sensor feels the ball bounced on the floor. Not all of the sensors work, or perhaps some of the batteries are dead or these is some other failure, since several of the balls don’t light up.
Members of the Middnight on Main team bounce the balls on the floor to make sure they light up before handing them out to the arriving guests. The balls are a big draw and many people approach the display to get a ball.
We also have a large wicker basket full of plastic golden kazoos. The basket is very similar to the old wicker laundry basket we had when I was a kid and that I often had to carry out to the clothes line and then later back into the house after the laundry was dry.
It is mostly older men that take the kazoos. Perhaps they remember them from their youth. One man talks about making toys from materials lying around the house; the simple homemade toys that we had before all the toys were manufactured overseas and sold in big box stores or before kids started spending most of their playtime on computer games.
There may be another reason it is the older men that stop to get kazoos for their grandkids. Kazoos can be great fun, but to a parent, they can get annoying after the kids play with them for too long a period. Grandparents, on the other hand, head back home after the visit and don’t need to deal with the continuous pervasive noise that kazoos can create.
November 11th
#ff #hcsmct
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/11/2011 - 19:59@chiefmaven @brandonframe @src_changeagent @elizabethradl @heangtan @healthjusticect @cthealth @chnctfoundation @chchealthcorps @cshhc @CHCConnecticut
This week, I attended two different events related to health care social media in Connecticut (#hcsmct). The first was a tweet up breakfast for various people working on health issues in Connecticut using social media. It was a great breakfast and we are planning on meeting monthly, as well as having weekly Tweet Chats. The first Monday of every month, we'll meet for breakfast and the other Mondays we'll have a Tweet Chat in the afternoon. The first chat will be next Monday at 3 PM with the #hcsmct hash tag.
The second event was a forum sponsored by Health Justice CT on Social media for social change. Joining me on the panel was @chiefmaven @brandonframe. They are both interesting people, well worth the follow.
A few of the people at the breakfast were @src_changeagent @elizabethradl @heangtan. These are their individual ids on twitter. I had already met @elizabethradl and @heangtan. Again, highly recommended. It was the first time i met @src_changeagent and I look forward to working with her on various health issues going forward.
These people and about a half dozen others were at the breakfast representing the following groups: @healthjusticect @cthealth @chnctfoundation @chchealthcorps @cshhc @CHCConnecticut . All of them are groups that I feel it is very important to retweet their messages, and I hope more people will follow them and retweet them.
That's it for this week.
