All washed up

I imagine that every photographer regrets certain pictures left untaken. One of mine is my grandfather’s utility knife. It was incredibly thin and narrow and had an odd shape from having been sharpened countless times over several decades; it was thickest at the bottom and thinnest in the middle. It occurred to me, after I had finally thrown it away, that a shot of the knife would have been a snapshot of how my grandfather thought. You didn’t throw away a knife until the blade was truly gone.

I realized this morning how much of that ethic I have in me. The old Maytag washing machine, which was probably bought in 1968, had sprung a leak. For years now, I’ve put up with minor leaks and a tendency to stop during a cycle. But making an actual puddle was too much, and so I ordered a replacement.

It had lasted for over 40 years, and yet it felt somehow wasteful that I had not at least tried to fix it. After all, on its last day in service, it still finished the load. I wonder if the new one will give that much for that long.

This, I think, may be the crux of the matter. I have several old machines in my house, which I am replacing one by one. Somehow the passing of the old Maytag in particular represents a step from 1968, when a consumer could count on well-known brands, to an unknown future. I haven’t needed to buy a washing machine until now, and so I realize that what I thought I knew about brands comes from previous generations. I feel a bit adrift.

Meanwhile, my dryer, the mate to the old washer, continues to work without complaint. Like that hundred-and-something-year-old light bulb in Livermore, it’ll be interesting to see how long it lasts.

Two degrees of separation

I’ve just read a book on the Donner Party, and that time seems so incredibly long ago, and so foreign. Yet I realized suddenly that I knew someone (my grandfather) who knew someone (his grandmother) who came out to California from Pennsylvania around that time, although she came by ship, not wagon train. Two leaps from me to pioneer times.


Recently I was looking for the grave of one of the Donner Party (Nancy Williamson, nee Graves) who is buried in Sebastopol. It turned out that I had a different sort of chain of connection. A friend of a friend was married to one of her family, and in finding his grave, I found hers. This is my photo of it. So long ago, so distant and foreign, and yet one of the unfortunate group lies buried two blocks from my house.

We have connections all around us to all sorts of things we don’t yet realize!

Well, it was like that, but sort of not, but kind of

Have you ever been frustrated in trying to explain a complex concept to someone, where words fail because two or more seemingly contradictory things seem to be true at the same time? Or you just know something, but can’t quite put it across in English and are left using lame metaphors? I wonder if there’s a heavenly language that expresses those things in completely different terms from what we’re used to. Perhaps logic is not the highest order of thought, but the grasp of what looks like opposing thoughts. Linear thought says, “if a, then b, and if b, then c, and that proves d.” Complex thought holds seemingly contradictory ideas in tension. Maybe linear, logical thought is just the starter language for humans; perhaps there’s a heavenly language, our real native tongue, where the building block is complex ideas. What if we could speak in intuition? What if we could speak in paradoxes and understand each other without the stuttering and stammering? I think we all have moments where an idea makes perfect sense to us, but we feel isolated from others because we can’t reduce it to words.

Maybe we’re not meant to, ultimately. My more enlightened spiritual moments come in the form of tantalizing glimpses that I just can’t quite explain. The idea of faith, of feeling certain that the Bible is true and that God is there, trying to communicate with us, is frustrating to try to convey, and yet we’re convinced that we just know it’s right. So maybe when God explains things to us, He speaks in this other language, instead of explaining things in a way that fits our logical ways of thought, like a magician explaining a trick. It could be that in heaven we will be given brand new tools; instead of a giant book of answers that explains everything to our present human level of understanding, perhaps our understanding will be expanded to allow us to grasp paradoxes. I even wonder if that's what the unused 80% of our brains is for.

Human tea leaves

I’ve been drinking tea for several years now, and have only recently come to appreciate the possibilities of green tea. Steeping can make or ruin it. In this process I see a parallel to the process of getting to know people. Unlike black tea, which is fairly forgiving, green tea needs a reduced temperature and steep time to coax out the best flavor, and the leaves should be allowed to unfurl. If you treat it like black tea, you may not get the most from it.

I wonder, do we always let people unfurl gently before us? Do we want to know what their best is, or do we sometimes demand that they be what we want them to be? I have been guilty many times of passing over people who aren’t instantly entertaining or knowledgeable on my favorite subjects, and sometimes I have found that they had much to offer that I hadn’t taken the time to discover. Perhaps this is behind the Asian way of doing business, to go through rituals of hospitality to find out who people are before finding out what they want.