NaNoWriMo
The Experimental Memoir Day 8 - Wesley
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 22:27When I started, I knew it would be hard to hold down a fulltime job and still get my writing done. Slowly, day after day, I slip further behind. There have been moments that I worried about having enough material. I knew I could go into great details about the moments of the day. I knew there were be some expected plot turns, and I suspected there were be some unexpected plot turns.
Here I am, about a quarter of the way through and I still haven’t gotten to the daily commute to work. Given the way this week is going, we’ll see when and if I’ll make it to the daily details.
Today, I was expecting I would write about a partly expected plot twist. I went to a Chamber of Commerce meeting and there is much that could and should be written about it. The meeting was honoring veterans, and at the end of the meeting, before the color guard left, they played taps for those that did not return alive. In this solemn moment, my cell phone started ringing. I tapped on the Reject phone call button and silently reflected on those who gave all.
After the color guard departed and the meeting was declared over, I glanced at my cell phone. There was a text message from Kim that read, “Wesley has been hurt. At vets”. There was also voice mail. I checked the voice mail and it was very brief. “Please call.”
I called Kim and started getting bits of the story. Wesley had come into the house and was bleeding. Fiona had a dentist appointment and our neighbor took her. Kim took Wesley to the vet where they sedated him and sent Kim home. Actually, the vet is closer to Kim’s father’s house, so she went there instead. She was waiting for more information.
I wrapped things up at the Chamber of Commerce meeting and went back to the office. I let me co-workers know what was going on. I work with other dog lovers and they were understanding. I knew that there wasn’t much I could do for Wesley or Kim, so I buckled down and tried to focus on my work. There were several projects I needed to work on and the day went pretty quickly.
Over the years, I’ve had plenty of pets. One of my first pets was a hamster I had in second grade. I named it after my teacher. However, I as a seven year old, I was not well prepared for having a pet. My mother ended up taking care of the hamster. It did not live long and I was very distraught when it died. Later, we got a kitten. The first one was killed in the first day or two that we had it.
We lived on a farm and the kitten was expected to be an outside cat, but some predator got it on one of the first nights. The second cat lived a long time, however. One of my chores as a child was feeding the rabbits. We raised these been New Zealand white rabbits. Yet these were not pets. They were food. With that, they never were all that friendly and I never grew all that close to any of them. We also had goats which we raised for milk. Through all of this, I developed a bit of a detachment for animals. Yes, I would cuddle with the cat on cold winter afternoons, but that was it.
Later, we got a dog. After I got married, the family got a dog. He was part of our family for many years. When I met Kim, she had a dog and he became part of the family for many years as well. It may well be that when they were sick or injured, I was as sad as I was today,
The Experimental Memoir Day 7
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/07/2011 - 21:07In the nineties, I worked for a large international bank and for a period was flying to Europe monthly to negotiate the firm’s technology strategy. The car service would take me to the airport for an early evening flight. This was before 9/11 and the bank paid for me to fly business class, so I could get to the airport, through security and onto an international flight quite quickly. They had an option for a quick dinner which I would eat, have a couple glasses of wine, and then settle in for the flight.
The airlines provided sleeping masks and earplugs which I would use, and drift off to sleep over the hum of the jet engines. Several hours later, as we were approaching the airport, a flight steward would awaken me. I would fill out the necessary forms and prepare to disembark.
Most of my flights were to Zurich. We would land in the morning, and I would take the tram to the hotel, where I would check in, deposit my luggage and then head to the office. I would be a little groggy, but I found that it was the easiest way to adapt to the new time zone. By the end of the day, I would be dragging, so after going out to dinner with coworkers, I would head straight back to my hotel and go to sleep. The next morning, I would awake, pretty well settled into the routine.
The corporate politics were complicated. The organization was matrix managed, and this was compounded by the international element. I managed to survive this fairly well, but as I became more deeply involved, the politics became more complicated. On the advice of a coworker, I recruited the help of an organizational consultant. She had a Ph.D in applying Freudian psychoanalysis to organizations. The basic idea was that just as individuals had healthy or neurotic reactions to stress, so do organizations.
I was fascinated by the idea and besides availing myself of her recommendations on navigating the complex matrix managed international bank, I took the opportunity to study as much of the underlying work as possible. This led me to a topic where people in an organization shared their dreams. They reacted to one another’s dreams, not by trying to analyze the dreams themselves, but by exploring the groups associations and reactions to the dreams.
I’ve been to various meetings where people explored this and it changed my whole approach to dreams. Yet still, I don’t remember my dreams as often as I would like. That said, there is one dream that often comes back to me in various formats. Typically, I have returned to college, but I’ve somehow gotten distracted and not made it to various classes. Often, I can’t remember which classes I have and when they meet, let alone my assignments or the material I was supposed to have learned. To make things more complicated, the courses are not ones that I’ve normally been interested in.
Rarely, do I end up actually going to a class in these dreams, instead it is a sense of dread of the incomplete. I’ve often wondered what these dreams are about. Are they attempts to work through unfinished aspects of my real college experience? Are they some variation of the dreams that others have about not being prepared for an exam in school? Do they reflect some aspect of being concerned about not being about to please some authority figure? Is it because of some general aspects of having things unfinished?
The office where I write is littered with piles of clutter. How much of this clutter is the result of unfinished projects? Are there other symbols of unfinished projects? Does it reflect some truth about myself, about how I approach things. I’ve often identified myself as an innovator or early adopter of technology. I like to explore something new and exciting. Finishing up things seems boring.
I haven’t had a dream about unfinished college work for quite a while, but just recently, the dream came back. Is it related to working on National Novel Writing Month, and some anxiety of whether I’ll be able to finish it this year.
I’ve also been curious about other dreams in the household. I awoke in the middle of the night to hear Kim whimpering. I figured she was having a bad dream and I stroked her back for a little while and the whimpering ended. There have been other times when she has clearly been having a really bad dream. Not only would she be crying out in her sleep, but she would be having goose bumps. There are times that Fiona also has bad dreams. Often they are early in the morning, and she comes into our bedroom and crawls into the bed next to Kim and I. I don’t often hear details of her dreams, but at times she will become scared during dinner or at some other time, and it will be because something reminded her of a scary dream she had had.
I got me thinking, I rarely have scary dreams. Why is this, when my wife and daughter both have scary dreams? One idea I’ve floated is that it has to do with television. As a general rule, I don’t watch television. I read blogs, social media and the news online and spend time writing online, but I watch very little television.
In the evening, I often hear the television in the background. I can rarely hear enough of it to make out any dialog, and it is in a different room, so I don’t see the images, but I hear the music, and the general tenor of the sound. It often sounds like there are scary sections and I wonder how the media affects each one of us.
This applies not only to television, but to all media. What sort of impact does reading a wide variety of blogs have on me? What sort of impact does the stream of social media have on me, or the news as it is presented after going through various online filters? Does the more interactive nature of my media consumption have a different effect than the broadcast nature of so much of media?
All of these thoughts come to me as I try to write. This weekend, we set the clocks back. That gave me an extra hour of sleep. However, it means that I’m writing later in the evening than I normally do. This comes after having gotten up early for a work event, something I must do again tomorrow.
Perhaps my words are rambling, like they may have during less coherent hours of my European trips. Perhaps, I’m just writing, to avoid that fearful dream of not being able to finish what I set out to do. Yet even with that, I am slipping further behind.
The Experimental Memoir Day 6, Hard Cider Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/06/2011 - 18:07When I was a kid we would often get fresh cider from local orchards. In a family of six, the cider normally went quite quickly. However, there were some times when it would get a chance to sit around a little longer. Then, it would start to get fizzy. It wouldn’t taste quite as sweet, but there was something to it that made it taste pretty good. I would hear my parents talk about how the cider was starting to go hard, and that we shouldn’t drink too much of it.
During the summers, we used to make our own root beer. We would take a five gallon pot, pour in a lot of sugar, add a packet of dry yeast, then pour in some root beer extract, and then fill the pot with water. When all the sugar was dissolved, my father would take a long rubber hose and put one end in the pot on the counter. He would then suck on the other end of the hose to get the solution flowing through it, and we would fill up bottles.
The bottles we used were mostly old soda bottles we had saved. We liked to use the older bottles that were thicker and didn’t have twist tops. We would fill them almost to the top with the fluid and then cap them. We would put them in the corner of the kitchen, lying on their sides, and let the yeast do its work.
The yeast would eat a little bit of the sugar and change it to carbon dioxide and we would have our fizzy, homemade root beer. It never really registered that the other by product of the yeast as alcohol, but I suspect that there was so little alcohol, it didn’t really matter. The same was the case with the hard cider. I don’t think it ever really got hard enough to have much alcohol content.
A few years ago, Kim, Fiona and I went pumpkin picking at a local farm. On our way home, we started at a cider mill just up the road from the pumpkin patch. As we waited in line to pickup some cider and donuts, we noticed a ‘hard cider brewing kit’. Kim’s first husband had been a beer maker, and Kim thought we probably could easily scrounge up everything we needed to make our own hard cider.
A few weeks later, we had everything we needed and went back and bought five gallons of cider. We spoke with one of the guys at the cider mill and he said that if we were making hard cider, we could simply bring in our carboy and fill it up directly, instead of needing to use several of the gallon plastic cider containers.
We went to a local brewing store and bought come Champaign yeast and started our first batch of cider. A carboy is a large jug used for brewing. In our case, we had a five gallon glass carboy. We poured the cider in, added the yeast and put on a vapor lock. The vapor lock sticks in a whole in the cork that we put at the top of the carboy. It has a twisty tube, which we put some alcohol. As the yeast converted the sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide, the gas could bubble out of the vapor lock on top, without allowing any bacteria or anything else to get into the cider.
We let it sit for a few weeks, and then siphoned it off, similar to how my father used to siphon the root beer solution, except we siphoned it off into another carboy, where we let it settle for a little bit. Then, we bottled the hard cider and let it sit in the basement.
This was a few years ago, and every year, we’ve experimented in different ways to come up with new hard ciders. The Champaign yeast yielded a very dry cider, much like a white wine. We tried different yeasts, and found that we like to use various ale yeasts. Other people we know like to use just the natural yeasts on the apples and in the air, and don’t add any yeast. We made batches at different times through out the year.
Early in the season, the cider was made from apples like honeycrisps. These are a sweet tasting and very crunchy apple. However, they don’t really have a lot of sugar and some people think the cider made from honeycrisp apples is more watery than other cider. However, it makes a nice hard cider. If we can get cider made with macouns, that is very nice, but a lot of people like to eat macouns, and there isn’t often a lot of cider made from them. Much of the cider we make is based on empire apples.
For other experiments, we’ve tried making hard pear cider. We only tried it once. The cider came out very astringent. After letting it age for a couple years, it has become nicer, but it hasn’t been one of our favorite ciders. We’ve added brown sugar to make a stronger cider. Brown sugar is a cheap sugar and you can add a lot to make a cider with a higher alcohol content.
We’ve also used maple syrup, which is really nice. Not only does it boost the alcohol content, it adds a really nice flavor. People I’ve spoken with also like to add honey, and just about everyone has their favorite way of make cider.
The first Sunday of very November, a bunch of beer makers descend on the cider mill to get some special cider made for brewers. It really isn’t that much different from the regular cider. There are some heirloom apples thrown in, and there are likely to be some northern spies. Some quince are also thrown in to boost the acid content and make it a little tarter.
I’ve now accumulated a few different carboys for making cider, and often have a couple working at the same time in different stages of the cider making process. This year, I grabbed an empty carboy and headed over to the cider mill. It was a beautiful fall day. The sky was bright blue, the leaves were still their autumn color. There were many piles of brush along the road from branches that had come down during the October snow storm.
I was running a bit late, and the parking lot at the cider mill wasn’t as packed as it often is on Hard Cider Sunday. I walked inside, and there wasn’t a line of carboys waiting to be filled, so I walked up and got mine filled right away.
Yet there were a lot of the same old people there, whom I’ve seen every year. They were sharing examples of their various ciders. One person had made a cider with raspberries and some Belgian yeasts normally used in lambic beers. Another person had a cider made with added black currant syrup. It was very nice, although a bit on the sweet side. There was a cider with added elderberries, and a few bottles of apple jack.
I handed a bottle of one of last year’s batches to the guy running the cider press and chatted with the hard cider hobbyists. The cider mill is only open during apple season so they try to make the best of it, selling not only apples and cider, but pies, cider donuts, and related products.
Whenever I fill up my carboy there, I inevitably get into a discussion with other shoppers about making hard cider. I describe the process and how I got started. Often, I go into philosophical aspects of making hard cider.
I like supporting local farmers. I like eating food, and for that matter, drinking beverages that have been locally produced, instead of shipped half way across the country. I don’t know how many people I’ve convinced to start brewing their own cider, but I know that several people have taken up the hobby.
Now, in our basement, there are several gallons of hard cider that has been bottled and is waiting to be consumed. We give away a lot of it as presents. There is probably about fifteen gallons of cider sitting on the dining room table in various stages of brewing, and we have our plans for who gets what cider when.
The Experimental Memoir - Day 5
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/05/2011 - 15:20Our life is more than our work and our work is more than our job. It is a phrase that I heard labor union members chant at an anti-nuclear rally on the first anniversary of Three Mile Island. It has stuck with me all these years and I often mention it in terms of things going on in my life today.
It seems particularly appropriate in an experimental memoir focused on living ones life as a novel. I can imagine people getting all tied up in the idea of living one’s life as a novel, and focusing only on their life work as part of that novel. But I imagine this could be detrimental. I remember the old saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
I’ve known people that are so dedicated to whatever their cause is, that it is all that they can talk about. I run into them at parties and listen politely. Often their causes are also my causes. Yet after I’ve given them a chance to have their say, I try to politely move on and find someone else to talk to.
I often talk about this in terms of social media. I will run into people at work who ask me how my weekend was. We chat about the stuff of life that isn’t directly work related before we move on to the issues of the day. Since I work with social media, I often have to spend time explaining aspects of social media to them. Very often, the same people who were just talking with me about their weekends go on to say that they just don’t get Twitter. Why would anyone want to listen to other people talking about what they had for breakfast? I point out to them the natural ebb and flow of conversations, and most of them eventually get it.
The Experimental Memoir, Day 3, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/03/2011 - 20:41I've written a little bit about the twentieth century writers that have influenced some of my writing previous. Now, let me step back another century. Instead of taking the train to Boston, I could have driven. Yet that would have required me to be awake the whole way, drive around Cambridge and find a parking space. None of which seemed all that appealing to me.
My thoughts went to various comments by Thoreau about trains. I grew up reading Emerson and Thoreau. I recall Thoreau's discussion about the economy of trains. The economy is a bit different for me, because this is a business trip and I'll get reimbursed. In addition, it is a much longer walk from New Haven to Boston than it is from Concord. Finally, the nature of train travel has changed a lot since Walden. If I recall properly, Thoreau also wrote about trains in Cape Cod as well, but I don't remember any details.
Another nineteenth century writer that comes to mind is Walt Whitman. While he was talking about being on a ferry instead of a train, his comments about the people crossing Brooklyn Ferry reminded me of the people on the train, how curious they all are to me.
Yet as I reflect on the train ride to Boston, I don't have much for recollection of the people on the train. When I got on, just about all the passengers were asleep. I drifted off to sleep as well, and slept through the first half of my train ride.
It was dark when I got on the train, and when I awoke, it was still dark, but slowly the dawn came. It felt a bit eerie. There was a mist rising just about everywhere I looked. In one place, a small cloud of mist seemed to hover about twenty feet off the ground. In other areas, the mist rose up from mounds of fresh dirt or mulch, or spread out low over streams and ponds the train passed.
Grassy areas were covered with frost and in some places piles of snow from the weekend's storm persisted. The trees still had their multicolored leaves and slowly the dawn grew brighter. Eventually, the announcements started coming in of the stations around Boston.
I was going to Boston for the Society of New Communications Research symposium. It is a fairly academically oriented group studying social media. I have been working with people in Connecticut who are involved with the group and was looking forward to the day. As I got off the train, I initially headed straight for the Red Line to go to Harvard. Yet it occurred to me that I was right next to the Occupy Boston encampment, so I headed out a side door, up the street, across an intersection and was standing beside the large tent city. At eight in the morning, things were quite there. There were various political and logistic signs around. Nearby a few policemen were standing around. Mostly, however, at that hour it was quiet.
I checked in on Foursquare and then headed to the Red Line on on to Harvard. When I exited the T, I looked around and got my bearings. I've been on various trips to Cambridge before and the environs of Harvard were familiar to me. Somewhere near by was the Berkman Institute. I walked down Massachusetts Avenue and entered Harvard near the Lamont library.
Back in 2006, I had worked on Ned Lamont's U.S. Senate bid, so I knew the name and the history. I was running a little bit early, so I stopped and read a few posters on a kiosk outside the library. Then, I crossed the street and entered the Harvard Faculty Lounge where the meeting was being held.
I've always had a strange relationship to academia. I skipped my senior year of high school to head off to college, but when I got there, I had problems focusing on my studies and, while I completed four years, I did not end up graduating. The lack of a degree has rarely impeded my progress, yet I've often ended up feeling like an outcast or pariah around academic settings.
So, it was strange to be in the Harvard Faculty Lounge listening to researchers talk about social media. I don't feel that a lot of the content relates particularly to my writing here, except for one comment. One of the speakers spoke about how Thoreau, Emerson and others gathered for a lyceum. It struck me that in many ways, social media today is the agora and the lyceum, depending on how you relate to it.
