The nobility of useful work

I stop in once a month for a haircut at a barbershop near our home.  The shop occupies one slot in a detached strip mall building.  Despite the relative newness of the building, the furniture and decor are mostly cast-offs.  There are only two barber chairs in the shop and a debris of dated magazines on a thrift store coffee table in front of four plastic-upholstered waiting chairs.  Straggly, thirsty-looking indoor plants in chipped pots, an old color TV that is always on, and a coat rack that looks like it has seen duty in a greasy diner define the rest of the space.  The owner is a man in his early forties from one of the "-stans," which one I am not certain, as his limited English gives him the choice of understanding or not understanding questions he would prefer not to answer.

His partner is a much older man who speaks the same language and limited English, when he talks, which is not very often either in my experience.   Every time I visit the shop, even in the heat of summer, the old gentleman sits slouched in his barber chair, a wool stocking cap of the type seen in pictures of Afghan peasants covering his melon-shaped, closely cropped head.  Most days a portable electric heater blasts away at his carpet-slippered feet, despite layers of shirts and a tattered cardigan sweater he wears like a uniform.  His pronounced slouch makes it appear that his head has been deposited like a pumpkin between his shoulders without the benefit of a neck.

If he is awake when I enter, which is not always the case, he opens one eye and regards me with a raised eyebrow like an aged hound dog whose nap has been disturbed.  Twice he has been alert enough to cut my hair, which he accomplishes very slowly but with obvious skill.  What conversation there is amounts to a few stock questions.  What you like?  Want treem eyebrows, moostash?   Is good?  If I answer no to an eyebrow trim, he does it anyway.

The haircut always starts with clippers and a guide comb to take off the first layer.  He mows off strips of hair, one even row at a time, and holds the clipper in front of his face for close inspection between strips.  If hair has gathered in the guide comb, he blows two or three times in quick puffs to dislodge it.  Most times his puffs are aimed at the back or side of my head, depending on his angle of work.  So I end up with wisps of my own hair pelting me in the neck or ear or sometimes the face.  His warm breath has no odor, but its humid rush always makes we wonder whether I'll be taking home more than a fresh haircut when I leave.

After the initial clipping, the rest of the cut is completed by hand with scissors and concluded with a soaping around the ears and back of the neck before a straight razor touchup.  The whole procedure takes upwards of 30 minutes.  But I never feel impatient because I know I am in the hands of an artist.  The cut is perfectly rounded, no stray hairs or uneven furrows.  My sideburns terminate in perfect horizontal symmetry.  When I examine my trimmed eyebrows in the shop mirror, a memory surfaces of my high school yearbook photo.  Like a sculptor who looks at a block of marble and sees the classic figure he will uncover with his chisel, my ancient barber scans my grizzled mop of hair and uncovers the perfect coif with his scissors.

Today the younger partner cuts my hair in less than 10 minutes, and only that long because I ask him to take a second swipe at the length on top.  The resulting haircut is fine, but I know that he looks on his job as something less than artistry.  He has a nine-year-old daughter and eight-month-old son to support.

The first couple of visits to the shop I assumed the old man was his father.  But, a subsequent visit revealed that theirs was apparently only a business relationship.  I think back to that visit.  The young barber is cutting my hair, the television is blaring something about sharks, and the old man is fast asleep in his chair in front of us.  The weather outside is dreary, the shop is empty except for me, and the young barber is grumpy.

Nodding his head towards his partner, he whispers, "I no know why he bother to come in."

"Is he your dad?"  I ask.

"No.  Partner.  Fifteen year.  Useless."  Not the answer I expect.  He continues, "Just come in.  Sits in chair.  Useless.  Needs to get up."  He reaches over to his barber's cabinet and picks up his cell phone.  "Watch this," he says.

He punches in a number and sets the phone back on his cabinet.  The shop telephone rings, an antique bakelite apparatus perched atop a jumble of combs and clippers and hair products on his partner's barber cabinet.  On the third ring, the old man stirs and pulls himself from his chair, painfully, slowly, and answers the phone in his native language, the "-stan" equivalent of hello.  When no one responds he says hello in English, and then again, and once more before pivoting his heavy head towards his partner and raising an eyebrow while carefully returning the phone to its cradle.  He shuffles back to his chair, settles himself slowly into position, and within a few heartbeats, his head has drooped forward onto his chest, whether in sleep or resignation I cannot tell.

"I wish he quit," whispers the young barber.

I keep myself from making a comment, afraid the old man will hear and maybe even understand what I have to say.  But I have the urge to grab my young barber by the shirt front and shake some sense into him.  "He's a good barber," I want to say.  "He's old.  And the worst thing about being old is having no purpose.  No way to contribute.  At least he gets up and comes in and cuts some hair now and then and does a great job, if you have the patience to appreciate it."

But instead I say, "He's tired."  And let it go at that.  My young barber friend, if he is granted a long life, will come to know what is means to be useless.

Want to eliminate the competition? Breed with 'em.

It turns out that Neanderthals may not have been pushed out of existence by Homo sapiens because of  inferior tools or smaller brains or less efficient hunting.  What got 'em was sex.  

Julien Riel-Salvatore, anthropology professor at the University of Colorado-Denver and Michal Barton, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, used a computer model to follow human and Neanderthal populations for 1500 generations.  What they discovered is a long history of interbreeding.  Genetic material from Neanderthals gradually diminished over time until it occupied less than 4 percent of the human genome.  And eventually, the Neanderthals themselves faded entirely from the scene.

If I read the news report correctly, Neanderthal women must have had some sort of musky appeal to our male human ancestors.  Maybe along the lines of the blues song, "She's ugly but she sure can cook."  Fierce competition for resources has been cited as reason for Neanderthal's extinction, the assumption being that superior intellect won out.  But it appears the real competition was between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal men for available women of both sub-species. 

The data seem to suggest that women from both groups went with the guys who had less prominent brows and better personal grooming.  For the cavemen of the day, there just wasn't enough musk ox fat to paste all those chest hairs down into something appealing to the opposite sex.  Whatever tactics the browsters employed didn't improve their chances for making more babies like them.


The implication of this research is staggering.  Want to get rid of the Neanderthals who keep trying to abolish the vote for women and who vote for restoring corporal punishment to our nation's schools?  Get your sons to marry their daughters and make lots of babies.  And then be sure that your sons and grandsons and great-great-great grandsons repeat the process a hundred generations down the line.


Eventually, the computer model says, your genes  will come out on top and theirs will persist in such small numbers that they only express themselves in the occasional protruding forehead or while viewing Ultimate Fighting matches and Republican presidential candidate debates.  Make love, not war.  The sixties had it right all along.

More about memory

I just want to remember where I left my car keys.  And my reading glasses.  And the name of that movie I saw with Paul Giametti where he went on and on about pinot noir.  And . . .

I just finished an interesting book about memory.  Moonwalking with Einstein by (I have to look this up because I can't remember the author's name) Joshua Foer.  He's a science writer who was covering a memory championship event (yes there are such things), when he accepted a double dog dare and agreed to train for the coming year's championship.  The book is a breezy, informative read, made all the more compelling by Foer's realization that you really can train your memory for things like discrete lists of numbers and names, poetry, sequences of cards.  It isn't supposed to happen, but Foer ends up winning the event a year later.  He's obviously a bright guy, but he comes across as a regular joe who worked hard and accomplished something.  There's hope for all of us!

When Foer took the assignment to cover the memory championship, he expected to be writing about savants, prodigies whose brains somehow recorded and remembered everything.  What he found were a bunch of ordinary folks who had trained themselves to recall sequences of cards in multiple decks, the names of auditoriums full of strangers, phonebooks, and epic poems.  These same folks couldn't remember where they left their car keys or reading glasses or the name of that movie they saw with Paul Giametti.  What they could do is pay attention and come up with outlandishly creative mental pictures that helped them to remember certain categories of things.

The techniques Foer discusses in the book date back to the ancient Greeks and involve associating what needs to be remembered with mental images--the more striking and bizarre, the better.  I gave the system a try on a 6-hour car trip from Virginia to mid-state Pennsylvania, attempting to memorize as many names as I could of the long haul trucking and retail companies whose rigs clogged the interstate enroute.  This occurred a month ago.  I mention that because memory research shows that what we are able to recall declines rapidly with time.  After an hour we may already have forgotten a third of what we knew.  After a day half.  After a week 80 percent and so on.

I memorized 17 companies.  The number of discrete items our memory holds on average is 7-10 (hence the number of digits in a phone number).  Here goes:  Schneider, Arnold, Shayer, Western Express,  US Express, Roadway, Swift, Marten, JR England, CRST, JB Hunt, Xtra, Maersk, FedEx, Walmart . . .  Not too bad.  Fifteen of seventeen.  I'm disappointed I can't remember the first two in the sequence.  That's the result not of a lack of memory, but a lack of creativity.  I used one of the school buildings where I taught 14 years as my "memory palace" and placed the images associated with names of the companies in specific locations throughout the building.  So, as I was trying to remember, I walked through the school in my mind, recalling what I had placed in particular places.  I started in the weight room, went to the coaches' office, walked through the showers, down the hall past the trophy case, into the principal's office, etc.  The first two images didn't come back to me, but I remembered the next, the comedian Rob Schneider showering in a obscenely comedic way (Schneider trucking), and the next, Arnold Schwarzenegger vamping in front of the trophy case (Arnold trucking), and so on.

A few of the images are a bit crude.   Pardon me please, Scarlett Johansson.  You can be sure I remembered those.  The first couple of milder images I created hover like ghosts next to their locations in the weight room and coaches office, but they just aren't strange enough to come back to life after a month.  All in all, I'd say the system works.  Like anything it demands attention and practice and as I use it to memorize other things (lists of Spanish verbs) it should improve with time.  As Foer recounts, it really does take training and practice.

Read the book.  And give the techniques a try.  You still won't be able to find your keys, but you might be able to recall a list of something else you want to memorize.

[Note:  I remembered the first two trucking companies in the list while out driving this past week.  The names and images:  Crete (a  very ugly cretan lifting the entire weight room on his shoulders) and Werner (the last name of my 6th grade crush, who I pictured grown up and standing in an evening gown in front of my locker in the coaches' office, beckoning me with a come hither look).]

Memory. Oops.

I can't remember how many times I've bumped into someone familiar--in some cases, a person I've known or worked with for years--and can't recall his or her name.

The worst is when that person recognizes me and I don't recognize them.  I try to strike a cool and familiar pose.   Gee, I haven't seen you since . . . when?  (Fill in the blank, pl-e-a-s-e.)  When this tack fails, I start going through the alphabet in my head.  A..b..c..d..e..f..g. . .   If I'm lucky, one of the first 8-10 letters will pull the switch that conjures up a name to go with the face.  If I'm not, I smile and mumble through the requisite small talk until we part, and then kick myself 10 minutes later when the name pops into my head.

Memory has been in the news this week, although the media hasn't reported it as an age-related issue, even if it might be.  Texas Governor, Rick Perry, during a televised debate among Republican presidential hopefuls on Thursday, couldn't remember the title of a third federal department he has been repeatedly campaigning to eliminate.  He could name two of three (Education and Commerce).  But the third (Energy) was lost in the fog of his 61-year-old brain.  In the spotlight, on national TV, for almost a minute, he hemmed and hawed, his mind a blank.  Even with prompting from the moderator and fellow candidate, Ron Paul, he couldn't recall which third department he would axe.  All he could finally say was, "Oops."

We've all been there.  Fortunately, it's rarely or never with the cameras rolling.  Despite the fact that I disagree with almost everything Perry says and stands for, when I watched a replay of the debate, I was squirming as he squirmed.  I knew he was mentally digging like a mad dog for a bone, trying to remember.   And I also knew that the harder he tried, the further that bone would bury itself in the rocky soil of his mind.

So why do we forget?  Psychologists acknowledge that our brains are handling more tasks simultaneously than ever (like driving, texting and unwrapping a bacon cheeseburger, while dealing with a navigations system that keeps "recalculating") making it hard to wade through the mess to find what we need.  They also point to stress as an inhibitor for memory.   Neurologist David Diamond mentions an additional factor:  that the language center and memory center of the brain are not close together.  "It's like New Jersey trying to communicate with China," he is quoted as saying in yesterday's Washington Post.

So, despite all this, why is it that retirement has resulted in what, to me, seems an improvement of my memory?  Maybe it's because I have fewer things to occupy my attention, although I keep busy with family, friends, reading, writing, travel, website management, and foreign language study.  It's just plain easier to focus without a houseful of teenagers and stacks of papers to grade.  All of that also makes for less stress.  So there's less interference in the circuitry, even if age means the actual physical connections in the brain may be narrowing from super highways to country one lane roads (or in the case of some of us, from country roads to game paths).

Recent research suggests that memory loss and deterioration of mental faculties associated with aging have been exaggerated.  So if you see a card-carrying AARP member searching for a word in conversation, that does not mean she's any less capable a thinker than she was 40 years ago.  In fact, the opposite may be true, the result (if she is lucky and healthy) of less stress and interference, and maybe, too, of thoughtful experience--a condition that we label wisdom.

Watch out. It's Autumn.

Fall has fell.

I love the sharp definition of things this time of year, especially the colors.   Grassier greens, wine reds, sunshine yellows, robin egg blues--everything crisp as the fall air.  Yesterday was one of those days.  My afternoon bicycle ride meandered along the Potomac River on the northern Virginia side.  At one point just past the Navy Marine Memorial headed north, the trail opens up with a view of the Washington Monument across the river.  In the slanted afternoon sunshine it stood out against a cloudless blue sky, underscored by motley rows of trees along the DC side of the Potomac.  Awesome.

This time of year speaks to me.  Maybe it's because I was an autumn baby.  Born on a chill November day.   Actually I have no idea what the weather was like the day I was born.  Cloudy with a chance of diapers?  Chances are pretty good, though, that it was either something like yesterday--postcard weather, ordered by the Chamber of Commerce.  Or something like today--overcast, a hint of gloomier weather to come.  When I look out the windows, I see the kind of November day I remember as a lad, walking home from school, delivering newspapers, shooting hoops in the driveway before dinner until my ears and nose and fingers were numb with damp cold.

Here's the deal, though.  Autumn can't be trusted.  You never know what you've got or you're going to get.  Right now, the wind is picking up outside, I can almost feel the tip of the tongue of cold Canadian air about to lick my complacent  seasonal behind.  I see the pansies on our deck hanging on for dear life in their potting soil.  The sky is gray.  With the windows closed it looks like . . . winter.   But when I open the patio door to check on the remaining hardy plants, it's still warm enough for shirtsleeves if not short pants.  Fooled ya, says Autumn.

So I know after more than 60 changes of the seasons to give Fall the gimlet eye.  And to double-check whatever autumn mood I'm immersed in.  A bit melancholy this time of year?  Lack of sunshine getting me down?  Hang on, bucko.  You will be out golfing in your shorts by the weekend.  Upbeat, focused as a squirrel gathering nuts for winter, as industrious as the ant in the fable?  Tomorrow morning, grasshopper, you'll be shoveling snow and wishing you had raked the leaves, changed the furnace filter, winterized the cars, and put up the storm windows instead of spending all that free time industriously playing internet solitaire and watching YouTube videos of idiot hold-up attempts.

What's clear and crisp and briskly invigorating one moment is blurred by sleet and cold the next.  This is only a test, say the weather gods.  You will be returned shortly to your regular programming.

Legacy

It's not something you think about when you are 16.  But at 64, if you've made it this far or farther, chance are good that what persists of you in the hearts and minds of others after you are gone is at least occasionally on your mind.

Penn State's hoary head football coach, Joe Paterno, is likely focused on his legacy this morning.  Unfortunately, the locker room motto that he has employed to guide his 46 years working with young men can't be read now without sad irony:  Success with Honor.  Grand jury allegations state that Paterno's longtime defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, had sexually abused young boys from the mid- 1990's to 2008.  Further, the presentment alleges that university officials were aware of Sandusky's behavior as far back as 1998, failed to act on accusations, and lied to investigators.  When Paterno was informed that Sandusky was seen showering with a boy (part of Sandusky's modus operandi in seducing his victims) in the Penn State facilities in 2002, he reported the incident to university officials and then let the matter slide.  We do not know, at this point, whether he talked with his assistant coach or followed up in any other way.

As a former high school coach, I know that some young athletes revere and trust their coaches more than they trust their parents.  Betrayal of that trust is despicable for many reasons.  It preys on vulnerable and defenseless victims.  It capitulates to base impulses.  It destroys innocent lives.

I also know as a former coach, that loyalty trumps all in the world of athletics.  More than once during my career I heard the refrain, "We'll take care of that in house."  Maybe that's what Paterno and his Penn State colleagues were thinking.

John Feinstein in today's Washington Post talks about how Paterno's involvement in this affair may deserve the overused term, tragic.  There has definitely been a fall from grace, and the plummet may eventually be even more severe.  This incident tarnishes an otherwise exemplary career.   The cause of the fall contains at least an element of hubris on Paterno's part, of pride that says, We don't need to involve anyone else in this matter.  We can handle it.  Whether from loyalty or some other laudable motive, he appears to have acted in a way that he thought consistent with his values.   But the result of his choices is anything but laudable.

Who knows what Paterno thought when he heard his coach was showering with a little boy.  They were just having some innocent fun.  It's a one-time loss of judgment.  We may never know whether Paterno was aware of other instances or of the extent of his friend's perversions.  No matter the outcome, it is tragic to see that a great man's legacy will be forever diminished by his failure to place the well-being of a child before all else.

Happy Birthday

Today is my birthday.  So now you know what I was doing in nineteen forty-seven.

It was a very good year if you were Buffalo Bob (Howdy Doody premiered on NBC), Groucho Marx ("You Bet Your Life" premiered on ABC radio), the CIA (the Company went public under a new name),  the damn Yankees (they beat Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers in 7 games in the first televised World Series), Howard Hughes (he flew the Spruce Goose for the first and last time and didn't start growing his fingernails and urinating in mason jars until several years later), India and Pakistan (both declared independence from Great Britain after peace marches led earlier in the year by Ghandi), or me (the first born finally arrived after 11 years of parental infertility).

It wasn't such a great year if you were Arab (the U.N. voted to partition Palestine), a member of the U. S. Screen Actors Guild (which implemented an anti-communist loyalty oath), or a resident of Snag, Yukon Territory (where record North American temperatures dipped to -81º F).

These fellow baby boomers will turn 64 this year, at least the ones that are still kicking:

• My running heroes (Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Jim Ryun, even though he was voted Most Conservative member of the US House by National Review in 2006));  
• World leaders with the best names (Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, and Inky Mark, Chinese-born member of Canada's House of Commons); 
• Respected writers (Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, Dave Barry, Tom Boswell); 
• Musicians (Arlo Guthrie, Carlos Santana, EmmyLou Harris, George Clinton, Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Keith Moon, David Bowie, Marvin Lee Aday [Meat Loaf]); 
• Actors (Kevin Kline, Billy Crystal, Glenn Close, Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers); 
• Athletes (Dick Fosbury, whose Fosbury Flop inspired my backyard high jump efforts; Lew Alcindor, who I saw play under that name my freshman year in college; and Jim Plunkett, who I watched eat every night my sophomore year at training table meals during football season, where I was a hasher in the mess hall); 
• Respected public servants (Hillary Clinton); 
• and others who you can judge for yourself. once federal courts finish with them (John Corzine, Tom Delay, William Jefferson).  

Happy Birthday to all.