Category: Ruminations

My son Barrett is getting married this Saturday in Charleston, SC. A beautiful couple, a great moment. I planned to wear my old blue pinstripe suit. But style-wise companions and associates convinced me that my suit is outdated and that it would make ME look outdated. So I bought a new up-to-date blue suit and had a nice seamstress at the mall take up the too-long pants. Trying the suit on later, I discovered that the pants still broke well over my shoes. Ugly! The old-guy-at-the racetrack look. I took them back to the seamstress She smiled and insisted they were fine, that if taken up any more, they’d be too short when I sat down. I did plan to sit down once in a while, so that made sense to me. But thereafter, it made no sense to all those style-conscious sartorial advisors of mine who, when consulted, told me my seamstress, God bless her, seemed oblivious to fashion advances in the pages of GQ and Esquire. The style, they said, is to be sleek and not too capacious (i.e., baggy) in the pants with the cuffs barely touching the tops of the shoes. All I can say is, they haven’t seen my shoes — black, bulbous things worthy only of Mickey Mouse. Perhaps it’s best if they get draped over like dead bodies. What this all comes down to is – I’m sadly out of date for such a cool guy. I must work on that. Meanwhile, my up-to-date, fashion-savvy handsome son – who was just a mere boy when I bought my antiquated formal wear – is having the biggest day of his still-young life and everybody will be looking at him and his lovely bride, not at the father of the groom. I’ll ask the photographer to crop me at the knees. And I’ll probably spend most of the wedding sitting down anyway. Apparently I have the right pants for that. And for the occasional dance number, I admit I’ll be a little self-conscious. So I’ll be dancing in the dark, while the new couple dances out into the light.

It was a Florida warm day in which, in the mid-afternoon, I sat by a friend’s pool in the city of Palm Harbor. The sky was blue and cloudless, probably in deep contrast to the threatening storms of the north.

Suddenly, overhead, there were crows, a wide trail of them straggling, probably, over a mile or more, for just when I thought I might have seen the crow that was bringing up the rear there came another disordered fleet of them, now and then a few circling away from the main body for some reason known only to God, nature and the birds involved. But ultimately, they, too, joined the movement left to right, high, so very high overhead. Continue reading “AS THE CROWS FLY…”

Endless cycles of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge  brings us nearer to our ignorance.

from T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

…and it is raining where I am. But the Winter Solstice has always inspired in me a warm, cossetting sense that we have learned to value and comprehend the light only because we have, through life, come to know darkness, in every sense. Robert Frost comes to mind — his poem “Stopping by Woods” in which his narrator has stopped by woods to watch them fill with snow “on the darkest evening of the year…”  That wold be December 21st. We are farthest from the sun, but nonetheless, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep…

Then there is Frost’s poem, “Aquainted with the Night.”

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I, too have walked out in rain and back in rain. I shall look for that watchman. There must, somewhere, be a  watchman. But I, too, will be unwilling to explain.

It is just hours away from the end of another November. It is the month of memorials, the time to remember the departed. At midnight, it would have been my late sister’s 81st birthday.

What I always remember about the month of November in the north is the shadows of the bare branches. I miss those shadows.

It is Friday, November 22nd. For my generation, that is a date that will live in infamy. It was a Friday as well, that date. May there be no more infamy, no such black Fridays, nothing today or forever to unsettle us. Let us, Lord, be at peace doing Your will. Let us hope and pray for this.

There have been better prayers at dawn. This, my little prayer before the sun comes up on this day,  will have to do.

Amen.

There, up there, on the high, high wire strung across the gray Florida sky sit , like little nobs, swarms of birds. Migratory, no doubt, refugees, travelers. Hello, birds. The northern birds have come to Florida. Out of the cold. Grackles, perhaps. Do they migrate? Will I see robins?

All around me, below, cars, speeding. We are in a river of steel and vinyl. I am sad. Homesick. Birds, I know why you’re here. Why am I here.

And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square

I imagine some chanteuse singing below the Samsung flat screen in the Iron City Sports Bar. As I speed by in the river of vinyl and steel, I imagine a nightingale up there on the utility wire, singing. Oh, singing….

In my life’s story, from newspaper reporter, then television reporter, to full-time writer — is there something to be learned in that journey —  through fading light — from the scientific process of fermentation?

Fermentation is defined by Mirriam-Webster as an enzymatically controlled transformation of an organic compound.

I love the idea of transformation. But all I knew about fermentation, prior to getting an assignment to write about it,  was that you can’t have a good beer or wine without it.

So — fermenting in the fading light. When I refer to “fading light” I have in mind a coming birthday and the relentless march of time. Aging, like fermentation — occurring sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light — is an equally relentless natural process. I  “brewed up”  that particular metaphor because in recent years, I’d been assigned writing projects dealing with fermentation and related technical subjects for M.I.T.. I made some money, too; enough to stay afloat in retirement, along with the help of some income from radio work.

It was fun and enlightening being a non-scientific person learning about obscure but important areas of modern technology.  For instance: have you ever heard of  tribology? It’s the study of wear-and-tear affecting, among many other things, engine parts and contact lenses. Tribology, fermentation technology, design thinking, machine learning — I was having a field day reading and writing about such things, mostly for in-house MIT organs, and on at least one occasion for an outside technical journal.

Then, on account of human and economic processes, this free-lance employment evaporated. I’d been working as an independent contractor, i.e., writer,  for a former television producer/colleague who’d begun her own public relations company. MIT was a client. She was good enough to throw paying assignments my way. But her client-related priorities had, of necessity, shifted away from writing jobs toward the non-verbal side of PR campaigns. I was disappointed, but grateful for the work while it had lasted — and for the fascinating subject matter. But I was also suddenly without a fortuitous and accidental source of income.

And I was back thinking about myself as just a writer —  a “creative” writer. I’d been blessed to win awards for my broadcast writing during a four-decade career. Those were fact-based, incident-based “news” stories. Now, I’m trying to write “story” stories. “Once-upon-a-time” stories. Some of them, through a process of creative fermentation, have been good enough, in my mind, to submit to outside literary journals. They were rejected — but that’s all part of the creative process. It’s one of those labors of love — but a labor no less. I don’t always love it. No writer does. Quotes abound among writers about the challenges of the daily grind of filling the blank page. But, as mom said, use what talents  you possess….”

Only rarely is there any money to be made in most writing work, much less creative writing. Not that we shouldn’t try.  The late Pulitzer-winning, TIME magazine theater critic William A. Henry III claimed to believe that only a fool writes for anything but money.  He and I were colleagues at the Boston Globe when he was the Yale-educated, 20-year-old newsroom wunderkind and I was a glorified copy boy.  He wrote pure, confident, grammatically flawless simple as well as compound sentence. But his light faded suddenly when he died of a heart attack in a London hotel at the age of 44.

For writers, time is of the essence. We cannot always wait for the fermentation process to begin before we put pen to paper or finger to keyboard.

Stephen King, to cite one famous example, makes lots of money. But I truly don’t think money was ever his motive in setting out on a writing career. He is to be admired for his seemingly obsessive and prolific pursuit of multiple story lines. Sure, he makes money as his books sell and get made into movies and TV series. But I believe he is simply driven to tell stories, and is lucky enough to love writing  in the wildly popular genre of horror. And, though I’ve read little of his work, I get the sense that he never lets the perfect be the enemy of the good. He’s prolific because he’s not in search of the mot juste. He just lets his imagination fly onto the page. (Extending the fermentation metaphor, I sense that he sells many narrative bottles of wine and lager before their time — and millions eagerly drink them down, just fine with the taste.)

Summing up, I would like to remain a television or documentary performer in some fashion while I still have a voice, on-camera skills and an abiding love of the world of the media and the people who labor in it. Perhaps I could make a little money that way. I need the money. But I’m primarily a writer. I don’t write RETIRED on my tax forms. I write — WRITER.

So, wish me luck.

POSTSCRIPT: Here’s an excerpt — a quick sample — of something that appeared in an MIT news release a few years back encouraging people to enroll in a course on Fermentation Technology. It was being offered in the Institute’s Professional Education division, an extensive and popular post-graduate curriculum of on-line or on-campus courses for technology professionals seeking to get up to date on new developments in their industry. Did I write it? I think I wrote some or most of it, or fashioned it out of existing course catalogue material, sometimes admittedly lifting whole phrases. This was safer than adjusting words and risk changing the precise technological meaning some tech-savvy catgalogue writer had crafted before me.

It reads:

LEARNING FROM NATURE

“If you’re going to borrow ideas from nature, the first step is to understand how nature works.”

That laboratory rule-of-thumb has guided MIT Chemical Engineering Professor Dr.Kristala Jones Prather in her groundbreaking work on bacteria.           Dr. Jones Prather will be one of your instructors if you sign up for the MIT Professional Education short program, Fermentation Technology

Dr Prather Jones will be a principle lecturer in the course being offered July 29-August 2 on the MIT campus.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER. THE DEADLINE IS (DATE)

SOME THINGS YOU STAND TO LEARN:

What are the clinical implications of bioprocesses?

          What is the biological basis for industrial fermentations and cell cultures?

          What are the economics of bioprocess simulation?

• You’ll examine bioractor operations in bacterial and mammalian cell systems.

         The aim of the course is to review fundamentals and provide an up-to-date account of current knowledge in biological and biochemical technology. The lectures will emphasize the place and perspectives on biological systems with industrial practices.

More than half of the lectures are currently working in industry or have industrial experience.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

The course is intended for engineers, biologists, chemists, microbiologists and biochemists who are interested in the areas of biological systems in prokaryotic and eukaryotic hosts. If you are generally familiar with general aspects of modern biology, genetics, biochemical engineering and biochemistry and have a general knowledge of mathematics, this might be the course for you.

Professionals who’ve previously taken this long-running course say it’s given them real-world tools for dealing with day-to-day challenges in their workplaces:

          “Í’s a great overview of fermentation theories incorporating all aspects from research down to manufacturing functions.”

–Associate Scientists, Glaxosmithkline Biological, North America

“The instructors provided a broad range of experience both in industry and academia. They went beyond the curriculum and provided real-world examples.”

–Sales Operations Manager, Finesse Solutions

          “This course allows me to ask better questions when I develop automation control solutions for my manufacturing science counterparts.”

          —Automation Engineer, Genentech

SEE YOU IN CLASS!