Mist and gauze

Missing my dad comes on now like a fog unbidden. Sometimes welcome, like a cooling mist. Other times foreboding, like gauze over the eyes.

Two times, the cooling mist. Once, working on the yard at my parents' house. His yard. The image of him in khaki shorts and a plain t-shirt, skin covered in fine grass clippings. The whirr of the lawn mower, the smell of spilled gasoline. He'd push on past dusk, and mom would ask me to call him for dinner. He'd stop, come in, and wash for dinner, bringing the smell of soap to the table. I thought of these things the first time I was out there -- after the accident, I mean. Holding onto the rake handle -- the breeze in the leaves of the pear tree above -- I felt closer to him.

The other time, just recently. Working on a calculus question posed by a student, wondering why there seemed to be two answers to the same problem. I must have worked on that thing for an hour, finally came to a good answer. Wanted to share it with him, know he would have gotten a kick out of it. Thought about how he'd made notes in the margins of his textbooks from grad school. Thought about the time I was in junior high and figured out why you wanted low friction tires on our model CO2 car but high friction tires on real cars. I woke him up to tell him that one.

Other times, the gauze effect. I can't shell a peanut and not think about him. How they made peanuts where he was from, laying them out on the village streets. How there are weevils in the last jar of peanuts we have of his at home. I get lost in that fog, lack a good way out. Am I supposed to avoid peanuts? Never attend a baseball game? I want to toast away each memory that comes, do it justice and move on, but there wouldn't be enough time. There are too many toasts to give my old man.

Books and covers

Of course books can't be told by covers, but this week seemed to bring books that aren't even from the same library.

On the one hand, Obama in front of 200 000 Germans:


On the other hand, McCain slightly befuddled by technology:


"But," as LeVar Burton used to say, "you don't have to take my word for it." Check out Jon Stewart's take on these political images that couldn't be more different:

Hooked!

Alright, I admit it. I'm addicted to the AMC series Mad Men. Set in the 60's, it follows a group of alpha males pushing the latest wares on an unsuspecting public. They're men behaving badly; they're ad men. Always with a ciggy in one hand and a Scotch in the other, they sit back and drop slogans like cookies off a Pillsbury roll, each busting with chocolate chips of bulls**t. Calling these guys fallible is too easy. As Ethan Hawke tells Nicholas Cage in Lord of War, "I'd tell you to go to hell, but I think you're already there." Exactly. But somewhere in there is truth too. And likability too. They know they're in hell. They know they leer, swindle, and lie. Telling them that is like showing up at an AA meeting and telling people they're alcoholics. Well, duh.

I imagine I'm sitting at their meetings. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and vaporizing pomade. Outside the room the typewriters clickety-clack away as an army of marms make Xeroxes the old-fashioned way, on Smith-Coronas. And I'm with these guys in their heads as they Jacque Cousteau their way into the American psyche, looking for that one turn of the phrase, that one image, that will convince people they need this to be happy.

The real question is why I find this vision so appealing. I like Entourage too, but that one's a little easier to figure out. Who wouldn't want to be the biggest movie star this side of Brad Pitt for a day? But why do I want to be an ad man in the 60's? The simplest explanation is that the show is really good. They all get more complicated after that.

Can I also mention how much I love this line from the commercials? Main character Don Draper tells a female client (soon-to-be mistress) completely straight-faced: "The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." Wow, bring on the apocalypse.

P.S. I also happen to love the theme song by electronic music artist RJD2. Give it a listen:

Lip to lip

No. 34 from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (the 1859 Edward Fitzgerald translation, purchased at a yard sale here in Vancouver):

Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd -- 'While you Live
Drink! -- for once dead you never shall return.'

Today I saw a middle-aged man walk out of Starbucks with two coffees and hand them to an old woman waiting in his car. I assume it was his mother. Her hair was white, her frame bent over. She was connected to two nose tubes that spoke to a need for extra oxygen. She was frail and little, and had the car door been open a bit wider, I think she might have blown away.

As n goes to [sideways 8]

As I've been preparing to teach calculus this summer -- amid the pressure and excitement to get things right -- I've been reminded of some of the beautiful ideas behind the big C. One of these ideas is that we little creatures of limited faculties -- who would destroy ourselves if we had the chance just to prove we were right -- might be able to predict what happens when some variable goes to infinity, like time. "Find the limit as n goes to infinity," the directions say. It's a bold claim, that we might be able to say anything about infinity. But all the same, it's a beautiful idea.

It's the idea of counting until you can't count anymore and then pushing on. It's taking measurements that are either so small in size or so large in number that you can't count them on your fingers, on paper, or even on a computer, so what's the use? but you do it anyway. You look for patterns. You stand on the shoulder of giants. You take a breath and make a guess. It's the idea of looking forever in the face and being unafraid.

Something about this idea -- or maybe something about the changes happening in my own life -- reminded me of that old PBS series Cosmos. With Carl Sagan and his sonorous drawl that issued forth science like depth charges. In one episode, he talked about the Hindu idea of infinity -- another beautiful idea -- that the universe exists as long as God is awake and ends when God goes to sleep. God wakes again, and the universe starts over. Expansion / contraction, the oscillating universe, death / rebirth. It's all in there: taking what we see, making a model (or a myth) to explain it, and asking what happens when n goes to infinity.