BREAD CRUMBS

I can remember: I’ve noticed how many of my journal entries begin with, “I can remember”. I remember when my dad told stories he leaned on a disclaimer in the second sentence, “In those days. . .” But I don’t hear much reflection from youthful sources. I think for them, forward is more interesting than looking back and a short memory doesn’t have so far to go. The way story and memory work is more complicated than the models we grew up with, but we needed something simple. Instead of filing memories away like books on a shelf, imagine taking the book apart then dropping pages in different places, all over the place until you run out of pages. So when you want to recover that story it’s not just going to the right shelf and pulling the book. A particular memory doesn’t exist as a book-like construct. It exists as a network of sequenced synapses, like Hansel & Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. 

Imagine a loaf of bread: you want to recall the “Bread” story. Instead of going to the bakery you have to first find the flour, then the yeast, then the eggs, the milk, the salt, etc. then order them correctly and apply the heat;’Voila’ you have the Bread Story. Imagine a GPS that shows just the route from start to finish, all the twists and turns but no names, no numbers, dot to dot, town to town. When you get the dots connected correctly and see a familiar pattern, “Oh yea, that’s Chicago to St. Louis,” you have the story. Memory isn’t stored in one place as a story, rather it is a network of scattered data points that must be reconnected. My simple explanation has problems but then it’s just an old man’s model and you know, entropy never takes a break. If I’ve made any sense at all then I’ll take credit for that part.

I never thought much about how memory works until I stumbled across it on a TED Talk or in a book I was reading. I better get it while I can; no guarantees. Advancing age has a way of leaving one either extremely grateful or regrettably disappointed. I’m in the grateful column and it follows, I’m grateful for that. I have time to dabble with cool stuff now. If you write it down before you forget it’s like crib notes and there’s no rule against cheating. 

COMING BACK AROUND

A friend of mine, haven’t seen him in over a year; he called me the other day. He’s been in a long term, drug addiction rehab program. When addicts go off the tracks they take others with them and I was onboard that train wreck. A lot of the emotional, financial aftermath funneled through me and I’ve had to wrestle with it. I’ve loved him like one of my own children all along, from when they all were kids raiding my refrigerator. 

     Forgiveness is easy for me but it can be misunderstood. Biblical hyperbole would have it that forgiveness erases the fact and you go back to like it was before. Forgive and forget. But it doesn’t work like that. The forgiveness I understand is to jettison the negative baggage; you just let it go. It lets the offender off the hook. That's not why you forgive but that's alright. It's like letting go of a hot rock. But you don’t forget, you remember. With or without troubles and hard times, things change, people change and life neither slows nor looks back. Forgetting serves no purpose. The victim in that miscarriage lets go the burden, for the sake of self. If the damage cannot be repaired then all you can do is to let it go. Otherwise it's the hot rock in your hand and you are the one on fire. Once you let it go you can both start over. Reconciliation is about balance and new beginnings, make something new, something positive, Good Samaritan. 

His rehab program was Christian centered and the brain washing seems to have worked. He talks about God and prayer with the conviction of a Big B Believer, something he never did before. I’m glad for his sake, otherwise I’m afraid it would be,‘Second verse same as the first.’ Better a slave to Jesus than to alcohol and heroin. After all, a religious addict has traded one drug for another but the latter is neither deadly nor illegal.

When I sat down to write this piece I didn’t know it would bring me here but, here we are. I am reminded how thoroughly religion is hard wired into our culture; you can't escape it. Even doubters, pushing back, it’s like swimming with dolphins: you don’t turn into a dolphin but certainly you experience buoyancy and you get all wet. I've been swimming with Christians all my life. I am comfortable with religious language I think, because everybody embraces one fiction or another and mine can accommodate the born again rhetoric. I can talk the talk; "God" and being blessed and allude to the sacred or being spiritual because it's all metaphor and I don't concede to an omnipotent, omniscient, super-dude. If you need religion you should have it; no different than antibiotics or chemotherapy. 
     When I need guidance or insight I look to the written word, but not the self serving schemes of 4th century War Lords who gave us the bible; canonized to consolidate power in the Holy Roman Empire. I prefer Joseph Campbell or Khalil Gibran. Campbell - ”God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.” Simply said, we attribute what we can’t understand to something mysterious and call it God. Gibran - “Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty and obey only love.” I get to make that distinction and am no longer bound by religion's Obedience clause. 

I don’t want to sound preachy but at the same time, I want some say in how I am perceived and remembered. I was never done wrong by my parent's church and I have no axe to grind. Loved ones pray for me and that's good, that kind of energy doesn't have a down side. Sometimes I lift one up, high hopes at best, unaddressed; but I am off the leash. My spirit yearns to know more about this journey but human nature and Western Religion's myth-fiction fall way-short. Mark Twain cut straight to the chase, “Faith is fine but give me a map and compass.” Seeking a safe, comfortable niche for my psyche, I default to Bertrand Russell. When he was challenged to declare either as an Agnostic or Atheist he answered, “That depends.” His logic was, if you want a theoretical position, the absence of evidence cannot prove anything. So, lacking tangible evidence to disprove the existence of a God, he would stand with agnostics. In a practical sense, he had no reason to believe in a God thus, he behaves/lives as an atheist. 

I like the concept of Karma. How we live creates an energy that reciprocates; what goes around, comes back around. We create for ourselves our own heaven and our own hell, here in the present. I take comfort in Campbell’s; “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live joyfully.” So when Grace (metaphor) lifts me up, I concede to it. When I see the chance to be its instrument, I pray (metaphor) I will rise to the occasion: God’s Grace-Good Karma, coming back around. 

GAMES

When you leapfrog backward in time and come face to face with people you haven’t seen for so long you can’t recognize their faces; it’s more like a blind date than a reunion. Memory is fickle. It can be crisp and it can be fuzzy. It can dry up and go away. In 1968 I was a senior in college. That year our baseball team won the NAIA College National Championship. I played on that team in 1966 & ’67 only to drop out of school to work a job in the spring of ’68 and return to complete my studies that summer. Yesterday the college had a 50 year reunion for that team, celebrated between games of a double header with one of our old rivals. Amazingly, our coach and all 21 members of that team were there to be honored. 

By coincidence and events over which I had little control, I was not on that team. It was the right thing for me to do and I have no regrets but sometimes, between melancholy and bittersweet, I’ve brooded over not playing ball my senior year, not being part of that team. The college put on a great celebration. Sitting up high in the seats behind home plate I watched as each player was introduced, their accomplishments and stats from the championship series were detailed. Great plays, and there were great plays, were rehashed and retold. Seeing overweight old men with bad knees retell sliding head first into 3rd, stretching a double into a triple; nostalgia isn’t all bad. But 50 years takes its toll and they had been on their own journeys, as had I. Then, you can only squeeze so much honey from the jug and memories pale; you can’t slide into 3rd any more. Kids are playing our game now. 

I spent a lot of the afternoon with Fred Merrill, an old friend, another baseball/football alum who graduated several years before me. He called me in 1989 to see if I would coach 9th graders for him at Shawnee Mission South High School where he was head football coach. I did that for 3 seasons, without a doubt the best, most rewarding coaching experience of my career. He called me out of the blue: Wow, life changer. Sitting there, I was comfortable in my own skin. This was where I was supposed to be, not on the field with the ’68 team. My baseball experience with those guys was before we were world beaters, preparing for one game at a time and then for the next biology exam. I don’t know how their championship season changed their lives but I don’t think it could have improved mine. Had I stayed and played, who knows where or how I would have turned out. I wouldn’t change anything, my life has been that good.

I’m reminded, it doesn’t take much to deflect the path of an object in motion. I can put my finger on seemingly insignificant, random events that changed my course, sent me off in a new direction. Watching a particular movie after getting fired from my job in 1958 resulted in my transferring from the Navy Reserve to the Regular Army. Wow: that was a life changer. In 1973 I was driving a tour jeep in Colorado. A last minute change of driving assignment sent me on a route I seldom drove. One of my passengers asked about my real job. After a long conversation he offered me a job that moved my family to Michigan. Wow: a life changer. Is there a way to anticipate little twists of fate that alter what seemed to be a foregone conclusion: I don’t think so. 

Fred and I enjoyed the program and a wonderful conversation from the bleachers. We paid attention to the kudos on the field but there was plenty of time to rework a long standing friendship. In our coaching relationship I realized even then, his trust and high expectations brought out the best in me. My take-away for the day was much more about what we shared than my connection to a championship team that neither of us played for. We had crystal clear reflections on our mentors, back when we were student athletes. Long dead now, their names adorn the fields and stadiums where we used to play. What we learned from them was: It’s not about winning, it’s about preparation, it’s about the struggle. I don’t know if they teach that today. 

SOMEBODY WATCHING

Does it make you weird if you do little, pattern behaviors in certain situations? I count things; can’t remember when it started but in the classroom, before I took attendance I counted heads. How many kids in their seats! I count birds on a wire and people in a room.  When I was an usher at church and they needed a head count, I was the guy. I count steps on stairs, up or down, either way. It seems odd numbered steps on flights of stairs outnumber the evens. I catch myself counting hammer strokes while driving nails. I wonder if it’s anything like animal instinct, like dogs turning in a circle before they lie down. Some of it does require thought. In the army, OMG, that long ago: a fellow ‘Grunt’, I remember his name, George Hicks from rural South Carolina. Not that I go out of my way to malign Southerners or even poke fun but George processed information, one synapse at a time. I suspect that would be true no matter his home state. I do have a thing about Southern culture and southerners but that bias doesn’t belong in this story.  Leading up to Christmas, the library at the service club did a promotion where they conducted video interviews with soldiers and sent them to the subject’s local television station as a holiday, public service. George did that but they rejected his interview and he got in trouble with the 1st Sergeant for it.  When asked about his role in the company’s mission he told the host that his job was to be the first one over the hill, the first one killed in action. He would not change his story and they sent him on his away.  His version was probably an unvarnished truth but certainly not acceptable for a Christmas greeting.  George once told me that right handed people always put their socks and boots on, the right one first and left last, that they can’t help it. From that day on, I put on anything and everything that had a left and a right, left first and right last.  At first (1960) I did it on purpose but it didn’t take long before it was patterned. Since then if the first glove out of my pocket doesn’t work on my left hand, I tuck it under my arm without a thought and fish out the other one. If I pick up the right shoe first, I put it back and start over. Now, I find it both funny and depressing that George Hicks is still pushing my buttons. I cross my t’s from right to left. I’m told that is weird, against all the rules of ergonomics and left to right penmanship but there you go. It doesn’t stop there. I am a spitter. Must be a recessive gene and I would have to reconstruct my childhood to find the root but spitting is as much a part of me as the spit itself. The first thing I do when I step outside, day or night, hot or cold is to look for an unobstructed avenue to purge a salivary surplus. Civilized as I am, that pattern behavior is divided into several sequenced elements and the volley can be suppressed if caught in time. It’s a boy thing I suspect, like picking your nose. My mom was like a hawk, redirecting my fingers away from the middle of my face.  You learn over time; when you notice the hand moving that way it’s easy to change course and stroke your chin or smooth an eyebrow. I often pinch my nose and readjust my glasses but sometimes you are just too late. As a little kid I had a great role model for nose blowing.  When I get caught now I blame it all on him. Thumb and index finger pinch off the nostrils and a blowgun shot under a raised elbow was skillful as Derek Jeter turning a double play. The old master never blew into his handkerchief.  That was for tidying up.  You didn’t want to be a bugger face and if you use your fingers, you would have to wipe them off on something else.  So you did maintenance with the handkerchief, folded it up and wadded it into a back pocket. I can still make the under the elbow shot but I do look first to see if someone’s watching.  

DOTTING THE i

The difference between study and reading, as I see it, is the bar is set much higher for study than for reading. All you need to read successfully is to understand. Study implies the need to not only understand but also remember and correlate what you  just read with something else. Often that requires re-reading, even some writing of your own to streamline and imprint the process. This week I studied two ideas, two different sources. 

I once told my boss that if my simplistic rationale appeared to be me talking down to him, it was not. That’s just me, taking care of me. I need very simple logic for me to connect the dots. Combine that with my dependence on metaphors, sometimes it takes longer for me to dot the “ i ” than to pen the phrase. Imagine two photographs, one of a happy person standing soaked in the rain; the other of the same, smiling person in the rain except under an umbrella. Add the umbrella and the context changes, not about people in the rain but about possibility. That’s how my study went; sort of like connecting distant 3rd cousins in the same pedigree. 

“Graves’ Values Systems” came out of research done back in the 1950’s. Similar to personality inventories, it created personality categories and predicted how different types of individuals perceived each other, in different kinds of situations. GVS was revisited in the 1990’s where its ultimate application was for how organizations function and optimizing resources. The article was compelling enough for me to re-read and take notes. 

Then I watched a moderated discussion between historian, Yuval Harari and journalist, Thomas Friedman. Wonderful juxtapose with Harari spanning human history over millennia, making cause-effect observations from foot prints left behind. Friedman on the other hand was stuck in the present, plunging ahead into an impending future that is yet to unfold. One references civilization from primordial to the present and the other from one election cycle to the next. Every idea expressed, from either perspective, took an immediate left turn and spiraled like water down the drain, to the central problems humans face. They didn’t agree on everything but they did concur on the most pressing issues, avoiding nuclear war, being proactive with climate change and coping with unavoidable risks that come with an explosion in technological advance. Three problems, if you will, are ripe with potential to upset if not wreck a civilization that we take for granted.

Graves’ Values point out natural pitfalls that could be minimized but fall between the cracks. The segue between Graves’ and Harari/Friedman was; Graves’ worked at the individual & small group level while the latter expanded the same mechanics to a global scale. Extrapolated out from individuals to cultures you get an appreciation for how short sighted and unprepared humans are for change. On the other hand, futuristic forecasts suggest - more than suggest Humanity’s longer range, uphill challenge. My thumb nail sketch of that scenario would be of distraught parents from the 1960’s whose run-amok, tie dye kids ran off to San Francisco to become flower children. If you have no control over your own creation then you become a spectator within your own journey. Clearly, the future of our species will unfold. Western religion requires a deity that controls everything but I kicked that habit. I’m inclined to trust Dalai Lama’s observation; “No one is in control.” Destiny can manifest itself in any of many possibilities. Then, after the fact, once it becomes history, it would seem to have been inevitable. Still, nothing happens in the past or in the future. Things only happen in the present and that’s where Friedman has leverage that Harari does not. 

Controlling artificial intelligence isn’t going to be the problem.  Competing with it is. When monster, external algorithms (artificial intelligence and machine learning) meet our needs better and faster than our minds are able, the Matrix model becomes a real concern. Would you like the red or the blue pill? I know this makes me sound like a conspiracy geek and I’m not really. In 1903, kids who could read about the 120 ft. flight of the Wright brother’s contraption would be senior citizens, watching Neil Armstrong step down onto the moon, all in less than a human lifetime. 

Today, the very best polo ponies in the world are cloned, born ready for polo. It takes 6 to 7 years to train a natural polo pony but only half that time to ready the clone. In a string of 8 clone ponies there is no diversity, genetically they are all the same pony. If that’s not a monster, external algorithm at work I need some clarification. Harari isn’t saying, this or that will happen, only that things will change rapidly and people are preoccupied with nostalgia and old world stuff. E.O. Wilson’s comment seems more relevant with every passing. “The problem with Homo sapiens is that we have Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions and God like technology.” When the gap between humans and technology becomes so great that only a tiny elite (corporations, government, military) control the data and how it is employed, people risk becoming biological gadgets. My generation is over the hill, the next may make it through but my grandkids are certainly in the cross hairs. If I’m just and old man pissing in the wind, studying Harari & Friedman is still better than watching the news. 

I THINK I THINK

Sometimes, when I think i’m thinking, a little, wannabe thought spins off like a lug nut from a loose wheel. Sometimes those ideas die on the vine but other times they take on lives of their own. I want to know how things work, almost anything, everything, maybe a case of incurable curiosity. Things like the Butterfly Effect set me off on knowledge quests. Butterfly Effect; where small, seemingly unrelated, insignificant forces (Butterflies) combine to help shape a large effect somewhere else (Hurricanes). Knowledge quest makes it sound courageous if not noble, like Amundsen’s quest to reach the South Pole. But quests come in all sizes, some no more than a pizza quest that sends you to the kitchen. I want to know how solar panels work and the way bore tides make rivers flow upstream. One thing leads to another. 

Recently; of course at my age “Recently” is a relative term. In this case several years is recent. I've been focused on understanding the Human Condition. On our evolutionary journey from cave to condo, being self aware has never been enough. Humans want to know why we're here and why we behave like we do. Can you imagine how deeply Jung and Maslow might have explored the subconscious if they had CAT Scan or PET Scan technology. But they were standing on the shoulders of Freud and Nietzsche and now we are standing on theirs. I’m too old to really go digging there but shuffling around the surface leaves me feeling good. 

When it comes to thinking, people may know better but we still default to a Stone Age mentality. 
The brain's role with heart rate, digestion and breathing is automatic, we don't have control and that doesn't seem to bother us. But when it comes to the thought process and conscious behavior we can’t give up on our divine responsibility, that's when it starts to feel like we're thinking. It is common knowledge in the neuroscience community that there is a system of checks & balances between the conscious and the subconscious that we can not over ride. One simply can not decide how to weigh evidence or stretch the comfort zone without the subconscious’ approval. It works like GPS on a self driving car. Then there’s Confabulation, a well researched mental glitch. But the human ego - civilization for that matter isn’t ready for that. Memory is not like a video that records everything verbatim. When one tries to recall something, anything that is either incomplete or unavailable, the mind can  fabricate and substitute plausible, pseudo memory. It may be vivid but it may also be fiction. It's a lot like someone having pain in a leg that has been amputated. It really goes against the grain to question memory and not very many try. Learning about confabulation blew me away. It keeps begging the same question; How then do we know anything?

 I do believe in self awareness, creative and critical thought but the best I can do by myself is to think I think. If there is a silver bullet it would be Science; redundant, experimental protocol and relentless, peer review. But that takes time and as a species we are not very patient. David Brooks, a columnist/pundit for the New York Times wrote a column back in 2012 about taking credit. I paraphrase; When we’re young we live as if success and failure hang on the decisions we make. That is how it should be, not because it’s true but because motivation requires a sense of  purpose and control. When you grow old, with 20/20 hindsight, you realize we have always been pawns in a bigger game and that decisions are more about the environment and our options than about us. 

FIFTY YEARS

Fifty years ago today Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Fifty years. That spring I had met all of the school’s graduation requirements and only needed one class to get teacher certification. A teacher in the local district had died and they offered me his job. All I had to do was drop out for the semester, teach his classes, graduate in May then go to summer school and be done. Ten years earlier as I was getting ready to graduate from high school, MLK Jr. was organizing a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Most of the decade in between I was safely tucked away, immersed in White Privilege either in the U.S. Army or at a small, Baptist, Liberal Arts college. I knew racism was bad but then as now, White Privilege lets you off the hook. If you weren’t lynching black men or preaching hate you must be alright. I wanted equal rights for everyone but it was their fight and my plate was full. 

He died on a Thursday. Three days later on Sunday evening my wife and I attended a memorial service on the square, next to the court house. The crowd spilled over in all directions with mostly preachers on the makeshift podium. Blacks and whites leaned on each other, arm in arm with common cause, maybe the first time ever in that town. My mother in law went out of her way to vent her dislike for Dr. King but when she told me, “Good riddance”, I was shocked and began a slow but profound introspection. From the Sermon on the Mount Jesus did not mince words: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then thou shalt be able to see clearly to cast out the mote, out of thy brother’s eye.” It had never occurred to me that I was part of the problem. Sins of omission are no less sins than those of commission. We held hands and sang, ‘We Shall Overcome’ and I cried real tears. 
Fifty years. 

This morning as my bacon-egg sandwich was coming together and the coffee pot chirped for the last time. On the radio a preacher from another time was pouring out his soul. He was preparing his followers for difficult days ahead. He knew his detractors would kill him, told his closest confidants but they weren’t ready to hear it. On the radio I kept hearing clips from his “I Have A Dream” speech. They played Peter Paul & Mary’s, “If I Had A Hammer” and Dylan followed with, “We Shall Overcome.” I didn’t cry but certainly there was a lump in my throat. 

After half a century I would like to believe that America has overcome racism but we have not. It has been swept under the rug and watered down to an acceptable level. People of color have options that were unavailable in 1968 but his dream is still just a dream. That privilege, the one extended specifically to white, Christian men in particular and after that to their women, it is still entrenched in American culture, institutionalized in policy and practice at every level. I could rant about a reprobate demagog in the White House or his narrow minded followers but they are just symptoms of a deeper wound. A subtle message has been spread that it’s alright again to vent hate and retribution against people of color, people who are different, that all that matters is what I want; ME, ME. Like schooling fish, moving to a collective conscience. My culture is turning back to a selfish, self righteous, dark side. All it needs to rise up again is a narrow seam and a crack in time. It resonates naturally to “Make America Great Again.” Like we were great when beating your wife was a man’s right and people of color knew their place. Was it great when children went down into coal mines instead of to school or when sexual assault only happened to women who asked for it? When people who have lived with privilege are forced to practice equality/equity, they feel like they are being punished. They push back with a self righteous zeal that makes religion pale. Change is the nature of nature and the “ME, ME” fixation will run its course. I’ve clung to a piece of wisdom for most of my adult life that says; Change comes slow, one funeral at a time. At first I thought it was clever irony but now I think it’s a simple truth. The way we vacillate between ME and WE, one lifetime may not be enough to see the change. If you want to make the world a better place, raise your children well. 

MLK told his followers, “I may not be there to see it with you but I’ve been to the mountain.” His way of giving them courage. He was shot and killed the next day. I’m still here, putting one foot in front of the other. I live a charmed life, not that I deserve it any more than Dr. King deserved to be murdered but that’s the way it turned out; and we sang, Here in my heart, I do believe; we shall overcome some day. 

Fifty years.

BE GLAD

April 2, Kansas City; wherever I go, even other countries, when the weather does something inappropriate it’s common to hear, “If you don’t like the weather now, wait a few hours; it will change.” All along, people think their home town or their region is unique in that respect. Why is it we have Indian Summer in late November and how come it’s snowing when dandelions are already blooming? Even when the weather forecast is out front and accurate, the weather here is always less predictable than any place else. Well, I don’t know and I really don’t care. My mother used to say, “This is the day the Lord gave us. Be glad and do something with it.” I don’t default to the Lord like she did but every day I wake up is a reason in itself to take comfort and be grateful. 

Still, we got several inches of freezing rain, sleet and snow yesterday. This morning: something about snow that one can sense from under the covers, I sensed we got more new snow in the night. A quick glance through the blinds revealed a healthy blanket on my windshield. So after my wakeup ritual I crawled back under the covers, just a few minutes, long enough to appreciate the comfort gradient between outside and in. It’s Monday morning and I don’t need to be anywhere before Wednesday noon. It doesn’t matter if I like the weather or not, I’ll stick around a few hours. If it changes, it changes. 

Easter dinner with the Millers yesterday was predictably proper and pleasant. I went light on the entrees, saving space for extra ice cream. My granddaughters are so grown up I hardly recognize them but they are absolutely cool. My April Fool-Easter was better than I had hoped for. Today is already slipping away and all things being equal, tomorrow, my dresser lamp will click on just before the K.C. Southern coal train comes through town. My alarm will buzz me awake after that if the train hasn’t already but waking up to the train horn is nice. In my own vernacular it tells me; “You are awake and it’s a new day so be glad, do something with it.” I’ll dress for the weather, whatever it may be. 

UNAVOIDABLE

I don’t spend much time thinking about calendar anomalies but today it’s unavoidable. It is the 1st of April and it’s Easter. Wikipedia provides some backstory on April Fools but the special day for tricksters and their pranks muddies up quickly. Chaucer gets some credit as he once alluded to the day as March 32 and in 1857 someone printed up tickets to the Tower Of London for The Washing Of The Lions. Easter on the other hand is Western Religion to the 9’s. Regardless of what you actually believe, if you identify aa a Christian it’s a high holy day and you jump through at least some of the sanctified hoops. In any case, it’s one of those 3 or 4 days a year when families come together, break bread and renew tribal bonds. 

This year the calendar has funneled both holidays into one cup, like chocolate with milk and it’s so, so easy to stir them together. After some stirring; three days-dead as a door nail, the man sits up and with a smug look on his face and says, “April Fool.” I go to church if you want to call it that. Devout, Big-B believers don’t think much of our tradition but that’s about them. We Humanists have taken our Christian, or Jewish roots so far to the left we can’t remember who “HE” is. In a sound bite; all religion is rooted in myth and expressed through metaphor. You take from it what you can, live as best you can but do no harm. In other words, be nice, treat people the way you want to be treated, all people, everyone. Beyond that, nature is more holy than anything people can conjure up. At my church today, Three-days-dead-April-Fool will not go unnoticed.

This afternoon I’ll be with family, tribal ties and more food than appetite. We will all stand reverently behind our chairs as we receive a resurrection sermonette. It has to be long enough that people will wish it were over but sincere enough, nobody groans. I’ll be the only one unbowed and open eyed open except for my granddaughter. She checks everyone else to see who is sufficiently humble with me being the obvious culprit I’ll wink at her and she’ll wink back. If the righteous groveling goes on too long we might make faces. But sooner or later hunger overcomes hyperbole. We’ve been doing that several years and I don’t want to disappoint her. Happy Easter and April Fools.