ps200218  On my father’s birthday: Playing the Emeralda game 

 Happy birthday, my father

On my father’s birthday I practice a dark art. If her were alive and I explained what I’m doing, he’d be in the dark. He’d be worried! His son is insane! Explaining a world only he knows, my father would think of me.

“I begin my day at a computer, using the navigation software to determine which of the ten islands in the Great Lake of Emeralda Region I’m on this day. To find this I go to the Gates Year-of-living Copiously calendar on screen and pinpoint the date. It’s Perfect Studios – the Island-of-domain-of-expertise-in-asset-management-and-legacy-transfer.”

My family never fathomed what I do. Our lives were different. Among them there was a unity of purpose and reality and I was an outsider. We make our worlds, or the outside world makes us. We’re either free or in bondage.

I am bonded to my world, what I was told is called the world of the mind or the life of the mind. My dark art is an art of the mind. In his way, my father practiced a dark art, too, bound to the farmer’s life of Nature and the seasons, of animals, machinery and growing things.

“I am a dreamer. Farming offered dreams, too, but the forces of Nature and the machinations of an uncaring society spelled doom to the small farmer. People in this society have no more respect for the farmer’s toil than they do for teachers. Yet, teaching proffered more hope, shielded from the might forces of Nature, it’s weather, diseases and accidents.”

Nature and the seasons, of animals, machinery and growing things brought father joy and frustration to my father and he worked to keep them in balance; and he did a good job of it. There are times when I blame him for my failings, such as my low self-esteem; but like the song, “A boy named Sue,” he had my best interest in mind. I do not doubt he loved me.

He had big hopes for me, and he was frustrated at times because I am not very smart in the same way he was smart. He probably had a grasp of the big picture, but his big picture was not my big picture. It’s hard for one to accept that people have their own big pictures.

People have a jigsaw puzzle in them, and no one’s pieces fits any other’s. I learned this he hard way. A glaring example is my failure at the University of Washington. I brought a complicated puzzle to my colleagues – so complicated that I put everyone to shame. I didn’t know what I was doing, despite I thought my achievements were university-level.

My notion of university level was not their idea of university level. I thought university level meant raise the bar. Their idea was to level the field; and anyone who stood out got hammered.

I read the college code assiduously and took it literally. That was stupid. My father told me so, reminding me I was stupid: “If I lost my wallet in the cornfield, I wouldn’t go look for it in the alfalfa field,” he told me when I resigned to go find, “My Perfect Studios.”

I responded, “I didn’t lose my wallet, it was stolen!”

Thus – on the day he would have turned 106 if he had lived – I practice my dark art in “my Perfect Studio,” an imaginary island on an imaginary lake in a perfect world, where raising the bar every day is what one does with what one was given in the way of a mind and body suited to the purpose of living a life of the mind.

Happy birthday, my father.