Instead of Victory, Defeat, or Compromise, or, Beyond Robert's Rules

 

My first two years in graduate school, one of my best friends was a woman from one of Africa’s oldest countries. She and I were roughly the same age (that is, older than most of our fellow students), and both of us were mothers, but in many other ways our lives, including our undergraduate educations, had been different. She had read philosophers I had not yet encountered, and vice versa. Consequently, we had wonderful long talks on every conceivable subject.

 

Once on a long road trip (we were traveling to a philosophy conference), I realized that our philosophical arguments took a form somewhat unusual for those in our discipline, even students. We would start on opposite sides of an issue, taking polar positions, but it was rare (if it ever happened at all) that one of us would triumph over the other. Listening closely and questioning just as closely, repeatedly one of us would concede a point to the other until, resolved on agreement, we had come to a third position neither of us had held or even initially considered.

 

Why don’t I call this compromise? 

 

Because neither of us gave up anything we cherished. What each gave up along the way were some of our original, contingently held beliefs that had come to be recognized, in the course of mutual exploration, as inferior -- or at least inadequate -- to support a respective initial position. There was no “Oh, all right then!” about it. No giving up in defeat. Both of us were more than satisfied with what we achieved by our newly constructed final position. And this happened over and over. 

 

Another feature I should mention is that our initially opposed positions were much simpler than the final position we constructed in agreement. Over and over, we realized that the question was “more complicated” than either of us had realized before we explored it together. 

 

I keep thinking about these arguments -- or explorations, or discussions, or conversations, or whatever you want to call them -- as those graduate school experiences may relate to hotly contended political issues, local and national. We human beings, it seems, want so badly for questions to have simple answers: yes or no, right or wrong, win or lose, this or that. What if the best outcome isn’t majority rule (one side winning and the other losing) or compromise (both sides getting some of what they want and giving up other parts) but a whole new position or solution or plan?

 

One local Northport issue is that of short-term rentals: Allow or disallow? I like what one Northporter has suggested: “‘Perhaps this is an opportunity to craft ‘a more perfect union,’ a Northport Neighbors type paradigm.”

 

Another issue is the RV park/campground: For or against? Personally, I like the idea but am concerned about the size. Here again, another Northporter suggested a third choice: smaller overall development, with fewer RV sites, more tent sites, a few rental cabins insulated and heated so they would work in winter as well as summer, cross-country trails – in short, fewer people and a lower environmental impact. Sounded good to me.

 

Rarely does one size fit all, and local control means each community working out what best fits their wants and needs.

Hell Is Other People’s Smart-Aleck Phones

Most of the time, I like other people. I enjoy pictures of other people’s dogs and cats and babies and grandchildren and vacations. I’ve always enjoyed personal peeks into other people’s lives.

When I was a kid, my family made two treks a year to a Christmas tree farm run by country friends, the first time to choose and claim our tree, the second time to cut it and bring it home – but not until after we spent a good portion of the day enjoying hot cocoa and holiday cookies and a slide show (or was it home movies?) of the friends’ summer vacation. I loved those images of the other family's life, and we made that second trek knowing and anticipating the entertainment that would be part of the day’s agenda. We were not kidnapped by it.

A couple friends and I used to get together in spring and fall to hike trails, have lunch, and catch up on one another’s lives. The catching-up often involved small photo albums. That was fun, too.

In an earlier era, not all that long ago, two people might meet and pull snapshots out of their billfolds to show one another. Fair enough. Nice! Cute kid! Or dog or cat or whatever.

But now, omigod, the ubiquitous so-called “smart” phones are in everyone’s hands – or on the restaurant table right beside the soup spoon – and there is no way to hold the attention of friend or stranger or family member when a phone demands to be given priority. “Just a minute. I have to take this.” Laughter. “Listen to this!” A text message is read aloud to you, from someone you have never met and very likely will never meet. The recipient finds it hilarious. You, not so much. Recipient must respond. You wait.

If the person you have met for this long-awaited lunch had only brought a handful of photographs, you might browse through the pictures while being put on live call-waiting, but no! Because the pictures, too, are now on the phone! And they are not arranged for easy access (they could be, but do you know a single person who has taken the trouble?), and you cannot take them in your own hands, but -- when at last your friend is at liberty to attend to your presence once more -- you must sit or stand patiently during a seemingly endless session of swipe, swipe, swipe – “No, that’s not it” – swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe.

I love my friends! I love my family! I’m often interested in strangers I meet! But am I the only one who often feels like a hapless hostage to other people’s phones? I’m here! Look at me! Talk to me!

Dear Young Ones

Parents, step-parents, and grandparents, we have come to an age where the greater length of the path lies behind us. It is a strange realization, one that prompts me to tell you a story. Isn’t that what old folks do? Tell stories to the young ones? Here’s mine, and I make no excuse for its rambling nature or scanty conclusion.

A couple of decades ago, David and I made an expedition to the other side of Michigan, “the sunrise side,” where both his parents were born. Out in the countryside beyond Tawas we found his father’s old one-room school. We explored on foot the nearby area where his grandfather’s farm had been, though no trace of it remained. A short drive away, we found his grandparents’ graves in a little country cemetery. 

By chance, also, in a restaurant on the shore of Lake Huron , we ran into one of his distant cousins, a bald man with the unforgettable name Waldemar. He was sitting in a booth next to ours, and when the waitress addressed him by name, David said, “I wonder if that could be my cousin Waldemar.” It was, conversation ensued, and in the end Waldemar gave us directions to the homes of a couple more cousins on nearby farms. All these cousins, I should say, were of the first-cousin- once-removed or second-cousin relation.

The first old farmer we tracked down, Howard, lived with his wife at the end of a tree-lined dirt road in a most picturesque setting. Their farmyard featured among its outbuildings an old log barn like nothing I’d ever seen before, and to the north of that barn, concealed by a pretty line of trees, was a charming small brook. Howard and his wife make us welcome, and Howard climbed up into the loft of a newer barn to retrieve a piece of furniture put aside for David years before, a rustic twig table made by David’s paternal grandmother, who died before he was born. (We still have that table. You all have seen it.) I always thought we might return to Howard’s farm, so steeped in family history. We never have, but we sometimes speak of it, and David tells me stories of going there as a little boy, stories of fish-head skulls nailed to a shed wall, of driving a horse-drawn sulky (is there another kind?) down the dirt road when a wheel came off – but those are not my stories, not what I want to tell you today.

The other old farmer, Herman, a man well into his 80s, lived at the end of a long driveway going straight south off the east-west two-lane highway. Herman’s house and outbuildings sat out in the open, exposed to the sky like farms on the central Illinois prairie. We were not invited into the house but kept standing outside to talk with Herman, who stood on the stoop, just outside the doorway, his wife standing behind him, inside the door, silent. Herman might have invited us in (or he might not), but he was on his way out, hot on the trail , he told us, of a neighbor’s spotted pony he wanted to buy, and so we took our leave.

Our memory of Herman and the spotted pony entertained us for years. We would laugh and shake our heads and ask each other what that old man in his 80s thought he needed with a spotted pony! Lately we understand better and no longer laugh, although we still smile.

And this is what I want to tell you. It will probably come as quite a surprise, and you may have trouble believing it’s true. No one , no matter how old, ever gets over wanting that spotted pony.

David watches the special features that come with movies on DVDs , telling me, “I learned a lot,” as if he will be directing a movie in the near future, and I read farming magazines as if I’ll very soon be bringing worn-out soil back to fertility and breeding livestock. When we travel together, we assess strange towns and wild landscapes as if we might start new lives there. We picture to ourselves and to one another the wilderness cabins where our novels will be conceived and birthed. In conversations in strange motels we imagine the furniture re-arranged, paintings and bookshelves added, picturing a whole life we might put together in that one room. You have no idea how many parallel lives we have going!

No doubt you see us as completely settled into our chosen grooves, the dreamy painter and bookseller, content to be what we are and as we are for the rest of our lives, not at all busy launching new careers or building new houses or setting off for distant parts of the country. (Maybe even another country! A houseboat on the Seine!) Not very likely, is it? After all, how much energy do we have to make serious changes, to make new beginnings? How much savings do we have socked away for acquisition and startups?

We’re not deluded, young ones. We know what’s real and what’s feasible, and we do not regret the lives we have made. At the same time, our fantasies continue to blossom in ways that would astound you. It’s a jungle in there, fertile and crowded with possibilities of all kinds, and in that largely shared space – because a shared life is built on conversation -the two of us are still young and vibrant and full of dreams.

You cannot fully grasp what I’m trying to tell you, never having been as old as we are now, but I thought I should give you at least this little hint. It will better explain, perhaps, my excitement over that old scythe from the farm auction and David’s satisfaction in buying the bright-orange rowing scull. In his mind, he is skimming over Lake Leelanau, you see, and in mine I am mowing our back meadow by hand, like one of Tolstoy’s peasants. And it goes way beyond that! In imagination we are writing and directing movies together and applauding one another’s published novels. Every road we drive down leads through towns and past houses we look at with an eye to their possibilities for us. Can we see ourselves there? Could we make a life there? What would that life look like? He envisions a smooth, empty road in front of his Hayabusa as he cruises at 100 mph, and I become the world's oldest jockey on my lightning-fast Apaloosa.

Our projects at home may appear small to you these days – insignificant and barely there. You may puzzle over my modest pile of old bricks and David’s four stout wooden posts and wonder, if you even notice them, what we hope to make of such small beginnings. Ah, but if you could only see our future with our minds’ eyes!

Spotted ponies! Spotted ponies by the thousands, still out there on the horizon, thundering along the ridge, raising clouds of dust!

11/1/2015