Confession

I have been reflecting the past couple of days on the fact that I don't make it a habit to say nice things to the people I like the most. Unfortunately, the only way to learn that lesson is by hurting someone close to you.

If I were to suddenly pay compliments from time to time, how would people react? Wouldn't I sound insincere, even when I meant what I was saying? Would people think I wanted something from them?

The answer, "Don't worry about the details, just do it" came in the mail today.

I recently became aware of a ministry that houses children in Africa and tries to find adoptive homes for them. Recent government action has greatly increased their need for donations.

Several weeks ago, I gave them a little money through their website. I was surprised when I didn't get an autoreply e-mail, but I was sure that meant I would be getting a thank you card.

What I got was a letter thanking me for my support, explaining their current situation and their gratitude, that was so heartfelt and written with such care, that I could not help but be impressed.

Today was over the top.

I received a card with a hand written note from the director of the ministry and a group photo of all children at the house in Africa.

That small gesture didn't change the amount of appreciation the workers or the children felt, but it magnified the appreciation I felt.

I am going to send more support, but I will also take a minute and tell them how impressed I am with their ministry, their ethics and their work, and try to show them some of the appreciation they have shown me.

And as I come in contact with people, I will try to remember how much small kindnesses mean. People can't read minds, they need to be told how important they are. Kind words are easy to give, and matter so much to the people who receive them.

If you run into me somewhere, and I say something nice to you, I really do mean it. And if I don't say something, please understand that I probably meant to; I just am not very good at it yet.

To all of my underappreciated friends, I am sorry.

Rick

Damascus, Part III

Continued from Damascus, Part II

Back at the house and thirsty, we went for the Brendan’s cooler. Matt, Brendan and I each grabbed a beer. Dee had a diet coke. All of our first drinks went quickly.

I asked if anyone wanted to try some of the wine I had brought. Brendan and Matt were both eager. Dee explained that he had a liver condition, so he was not able to drink at all.

Dee asked Brendan “Have you ridden this trail before?”
“Yeah, I brought my family here last summer.”
“How did you hear about the trail?” I asked.
Brendan said “I get a magazine called ‘Rails to Trails’ it tells you about all of the train tracks that have been converted to bicycle trails around the country.
“I like to ride on the Silver Comet Trail. It is 61 miles long, from Smyrna, GA to the Alabama border. On the stretch that I take my kids there is a long tunnel. I have a light and an air horn on my bike. I like to ride behind my kids, turn on the light and blow the horn.
“I got up one morning and decided to see how far I could go. When I got to Alabama I called my wife to let her know I was going to be home late.”

“I have been riding a bit lately,” Dee said. “I had been lifting weights, but that only put more weight on.”
“When I started running I ran every day until I got up to 3 miles a day,” Matt joined in, “then I got the flu, and didn’t run for almost two weeks. It felt like I was starting all over.”

I chose not to say anything. The only aerobic activity I do is ballroom dancing, and I didn’t feel it was quite in the same league. Besides, I had just met these guys today, and that didn’t seem the way to try to impress them.

Matt ducked into the house to check the score of the game. He was a Tennessee grad. They were playing Kansas for the women’s basketball championship. While he was inside he looked at the wine bottles I had brought.

“How do you make the different kinds?”
“I buy kits that come with 4 gallons of juice from that grape variety. You pour the juice into a bucket, add 2 gallons of water and sprinkle yeast on top. It ferments for about 2 weeks, then you siphon it off into a glass bottle for another 4 weeks, adding a couple of chemicals that make the wine go from cloudy to clear. Then it is ready to bottle.”
He was looking at my Pinot Noir. “I like the label.”
“Yeah, I have fun with those. To start, I type the name of the wine into Google and do an image search. Pinot Noir has a sort of hedonistic mystique surrounding it. One sommelier called it ‘Sex in a glass.’ So when that picture came up,” referring to the painting of a topless woman walking along a coastline with a sailboat in the background, “it seemed to fit.”

I went into the house for a minute. When I came out, Brendan and Dee were telling stories about when they were in the service.

Matt asked them, as veterans, what they thought about the war in Iraq.
Brendan talked about Saddam Hussein as the greatest ecological terrorist in history. He talked about the first gulf war, and the burning of the oil wells.

Later Dee started talking about Japan. “When I was over there I met American guys who swore they would never move back.”
I said “I met one guy who used to live there. He said Tokyo was the most civilized place on earth. He has since moved back there.”
He said “The guys I was talking to said that the women over there doted on the men.”
“I have a friend who married a woman from China. He said he was amazed at the way she would drop everything and pay attention to him.”
“Yeah, it is the same way in Japan. Of course, my ex-wife is Japanese. But she adapted too well to America.”

He said “At one point I had clicked on something at Match.com and I started to get all sorts of messages from women in China that wanted to meet me. But I am not really interested in Chinese women.”
I said “One thing that surprised me over there was how diverse the population is. The population is supposed to be 1 ethnic group. Something like 94% are ‘Han Chinese’, but there is a lot of variety in that group.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The people were very different in the 3 parts of the country I visited.”
“Which had the best looking women?”
“Xi’an. I was shocked at all the beautiful women walking around.”
“But Chinese women don’t have any curves.”
“They do in Xi’an.”
“Maybe I should go back to Match.com.”

Damascus, Part II

This is a continuation of Damascus, Part I.

I was already at the rental house when the others arrived.

“Hey Brendan, how are you?”
“I’m finer than frog hair. “
He introduced me to a short, box shaped man with a grey goatee, “This is Dee. he does 3rd party logistics.”
“And Matt,” turning to a tall man in his late 20’s. “He works with me.”

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Tonight we are riding into town for pizza. We will ride the trail tomorrow, then dinner and the theater. Back home Thursday.”

We had only 3 bikes, so one of us was going to have to drive to dinner. I thought about volunteering because I had no confidence that I would be able to ride a mile, but I didn’t want my first bike ride in 15 years to be down the side of a mountain. I know you are not supposed to forget how, but I wanted to remember on flat land.

The pizza place was in a supermarket plaza. Pizza with strangers usually involves complex negotiations, but this place had a buffet so the process was painless.

For Dee, Matt and Brendan this trip was an extension to the sales conference they attended earlier in the week, and at first they were talking about things they had done together and people I didn’t know. They were laughing a lot. I was listening for a chance to contribute or a joke I could understand.

The waitress came over to refill our drinks. I didn’t notice her paying any extra attention, but as soon as she left, Matt and Dee both started saying that she really liked Brendan. As she was the only woman in the place that was even moderately attractive, the subject was interesting enough for a few minutes of conversation, and it was a joke for the rest of the trip.

Matt mentioned that he was engaged. Dee started to talk about his impending divorce and Brendan cut him off. “We are getting away for a few days. No work and no divorce.” Matt and I both told stories about friends who had made dumb relationship choices.

We ate pizza, drank root beer and talked about nothing in particular for a while longer.

Matt had been the one to drive to dinner, but Brendan drove back, allowing Matt some bike time. The parking lot was about 10 feet higher than the trail. Before dinner we had walked our bikes up the steep hill. After, we rode them down. Knowing that the next day we would be riding down the side of a mountain, this seemed like good practice.

The descent was without incident, but before we had gotten far Matt had a problem with his gears. Dee was in front, and he continued on, unaware of the problem. I stopped and waited, looking for opportunities to make suggestions as Matt turned his bike upside down and worked the peddles with his hands, watching the chain turn.

The ride to the restaurant had been easier than I expected. Struggling on the way back, I realized that the trail only looked flat. I was glad that our trip to town in the morning would be down hill.

Getting Out of Hand

I watched the Perpetual Commercial 400 at Daytona Saturday night.

In baseball, football, basketball and hockey they wait for the game to stop before a commercial. In soccer, where the clock never stops running, they wait for halftime before they run commercials. Only NASCAR, a program featuring rolling billboards going in circles, cuts away to commercial during competition; despite frequent caution periods where actual racing is prohibited.

The broadcasters realize that the slogan "Every Lap Matters" is ridiculous. Every time a car spins or some debris falls on the track the race goes to caution, and any lead that has been built up is erased. Each caution also allows one driver who fallen behind to get a lap back. The networks believe that as long as they show the last 10 laps of the race uninterrupted viewers will keep coming back. NBC pushed this to the limit showing 2 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of racing during their last year of NASCAR coverage.

TNT either to make a better product, or to find a way to reach Tivo owners, has gone with a new format for advertising. Instead of cutting away from the race to show commercials, they have logos on the screen constantly and at odd intervals show commercials on part of the screen while continuing to show the race on the rest. This allows for seeing more of the race, but it makes the commercials seem endless.

Every time something happened we were listening to the sponsors not the announcers. We could see Allmendinger hit the wall, but were left to wonder what caused it. Who hit Biffle? Why was Kyle running on the apron? We wait to find out.

And even with the national commercials being shown during the race coverage, they still cut away several times for local ads.

At Daytona, the UPS Toyota of David Reutimann came back from 5 laps down, on 5 successive cautions, to finish 22nd. Kyle Busch’s Interstate Batteries Toyota was leading when the caution came out with 4 laps to go. On the restart he managed to hold off a challenge by Carl Edwards, in the Aflac Ford, and held a narrow lead when the caution came out on the last lap, ending the race. Kyle Petty did not bring any Papa John’s pizza to the other announcers in the booth, but the winning team sprayed Coke Zero on each other in victory lane.

Damascus, Part I

I had only been back from Florida for 5 minutes when Brendan called.

“Hey Brendan.”
“Rickster. You free this week?”
“No plans.”
“Out-standing, we are going to Damascus, Virginia for a 17 mile bike ride. It’ll be a blast. Meet us there tomorrow at 4.”
“Brendan, I can’t ride a bike 17 miles.”
“No, it’ll be no problem, it’s all downhill. You won’t even have to peddle. It’s going to be great. We are renting bikes and riding around town, we’re going out for dinner and going to see a play.”

His words were coming too fast for me to make much sense of them, but Brendan’s excitement is difficult to resist. Even without any clear understanding of what I was setting out for, I was looking forward to the trip.

It's the Little Things

Standing between the lanes of mid-morning traffic, my concentration is focused on the cars coming towards me with no time to think about how dangerous the simplest things can be.

In China many things seem familiar from the outside, but are bewildering once you wade in. Nothing exemplifies this better than crossing the street in Xi’an. Some blocks are too long for people to walk to the corner, so they have provided crosswalks between blocks, across 6 lanes of traffic, without a stoplight.

The technique is to wait for an opening, cross the first lane, and stand between lanes until there is an opening in the next. It’s Frogger with slower hops. Fortunately, there is no time limit either, so I am free to wait until a local shows up that also wants to cross.

The short grey-haired Asian lady to my left does not provide any more protection from the tons of metal racing past than do the lines of the cross walk, but since I am using her as a guide I might as well use her as a shield.

Reaching the median, I do not switch sides with her, which leaves me unshielded, but only because it would make obvious that a little old lady was helping me cross the street.

My first weekend in Shanghai, I could not find any correlation between the motion of the crowds and the color of the crossing lights. I was so out of step that I almost walked in front of a limousine. Only a friendly hand stopped me from becoming a hood ornament.

In Beijing, the system was easier to decipher, bicycle lanes could be crossed against the light, and car lanes with the light. It quickly became habit; to the point that when I was stuck behind a group of 4 people waiting for the light to change before they would cross anything, I cursed them to myself as “stupid tourists.”

The rules for cars in China are different too; so different that the government recommends living in the country 6 months before getting a license. I rode on one street in Shanghai where repeatedly 3 lanes entered an intersection and only 2 exited. The left lane was not a turn lane, it just ceased to be.

On an expressway in Beijing, the cab I was in passed between 2 vehicles that were in adjacent lanes. One of my cab drivers in Xi’an liked to pass while turning, with an aggressiveness that would impress Michael Schumacher.

There were many times that an accident seemed inevitable, but the crash never came. I only saw one accident scene. A taxi had been rear-ended in a hotel parking lot.

There are traffic officers in China. Every “people’s security” car that I saw had its lights flashing as it flowed with the traffic, but none of the other drivers paid any attention. I also saw a number of traffic officers on foot, but, watching them ignore the chaos around them, I couldn’t guess what their job duties were.

Nowhere is pedestrian life more complex than Xi’an. The downtown area, enclosed by ancient city walls, is comfortably sized for walking. The 12 foot wide sidewalks are inviting, and no doubt once were safe. But government efforts to develop Western China have brought money into Xi’an, and money means cars.

All of these cars have no place to park, so they park on the sidewalks. They enter at intersections and drive on them until they find an empty parking spot.

Perhaps permitting cars to drive on the sidewalks does compensate drivers for having to share the road with legalized jaywalkers. Whatever the rationalization, a stroll in Xi’an is never without excitement.

Till Then

What I noticed first was that a couple of pieces seemed to be bigger than the others. The impression I had was pebble sized, but the texture made me realize it was burned bodies. Had it all been the soft powder I was expecting I might not have thought “That is all that is left of my grandparents.”

My grandfather’s wish had been that his ashes be saved, and when the time came they be mingled with my grandmother’s and spread in the bay.

I stood on the dock with grey dust on my fingers and a sick feeling in my stomach while other people went up and gathered a handful of ashes to toss into the water.

I was sent on a couple of errands, which I happily ran for some time alone. When I got back I drank too much then got a ride to my hotel room for a nap. I woke up with a headache and started to plan my trip home.

The memorial service had been pleasant enough. Jim had found a selection of hymns sung by Willie Nelson, which more reflected his tastes than my grandparents, but it made the songs more entertaining than solemn.

At the front of the room was a picture of my grandparents together, a montage of pictures of my grandmother, and several of the paintings that she had done.

Rod led the service. He started by asking his brother Bill, the anthropologist, to talk about funeral traditions in various societies. He said that all societies that we know of have some sort of funeral tradition and they were as much for the people who attend the ceremony as for the person being remembered.

When Rod asked for people to talk about their memories, Bill had the most to say, talking mostly about the times visiting my grandparents when he had been growing up. He also made the point that until my grandfather’s passing, no one could ever recall seeing my grandparents apart.

My cousin Barbara, and my father, who were the closest to my grandmother said only a little. I said nothing.

We had scripture readings, Psalm 23, 1 Corinthians 13, the traditional favorites, and also from Ecclesiastes, a favorite of mine.

We closed with God Be With You Till We Meet Again which is essentially the Stuart family hymn. Rod opted for speaking it, neither trusting his ability to sing nor us to join in.

God be with you till we meet again;
by his counsels guide, uphold you,
with his sheep securely fold you;
God be with you till we meet again.

Till we meet, till we meet,
till we meet at Jesus' feet;
till we meet, till we meet,
God be with you till we meet again.