Not Famous

  

September 26, 2022

 

Greetings from the everyday,

 I know very few people whom one might describe as ‘famous’.  In fact, this truth is one I have in common with the majority of the population.  Most of the people I know, and that you know, are not famous. 

 Before I go any further, I will note that there is no appropriate word for this place in society, the ‘non-famous’.  The dictionary suggests ‘obscure’ or ‘unknown’ or even ‘inconspicuous’.  But these are ridiculous terms for the people we know, whom we have already identified as virtually everyone in existence.  Hold this thought.

 The idea of famousness is a relatively new construct in the history of humanity.  Originally it was associated with leadership or some legitimate accomplishment that contributed to the betterment of the world.  If you look back one hundred years at who was famous, it was people, (mostly men, such was the time) who were religious leaders, politicians, authors, and scientists. 

 As technology advanced allowing entertainers to broaden their reach, a new version of famous was created.  Radio then movies then TV changed the concept of who was notable, and recognizable.  And then the internet changed all of this again, even more dramatically.  The famous pool became wider and more shallow.

 So, we see the stage we have set.  The goal of being known by a large number of strangers for something significant, or even ridiculous, is a full-time occupation for many people.  This is alongside the large and growing number of ‘mega-celebrities’ who count their Twitter followers in the hundreds of millions.

 I brought us this far for only one reason.  It is not to moan and wring my hands about the state of the world.  There are too many other places you can gather to say “Ain’t it awful?”  Seen from outside the context of society, it’s a bizarre kind of religion, celebrity worship.  But here’s what I think is more important.

 Our lives are filled with regular people who are not known beyond their circle of friends and family.  They are known for who they are, good or bad, not known for being known.  I am guilty of taking their ‘status’ for granted.  I suspect you are too.

 My friends are not celebrities.  For the most part, they are not award-winning, or world-renowned, or record holders, or influencers.  Many of the people I know, including close friends, are just like most of the people you know.  And you are one of the regular people they know.  See how important we are to each other?

 Recently I had lunch with a friend, whose name you would recognize if you spend any time in these pages, but otherwise is not famous.  He is kind and thoughtful.  He is patient, smart, he is creative, talented, and hard-working.  I believe him to be a good parent and spouse.  This is not his resume, just getting you in the door.

 We ate our food, touched on our family news, and traded thoughts and ideas.  We talked about podcasts we’d heard, books we read.  Like all perfect conversations, one thing led to another, organically.  Then, he was explaining something he learned about empathy, a worthy lesson, and as he told me about it his eyes brimmed with tears, spilled onto his cheeks.  It was an unconscious thing, and he seemed not to notice as he spoke, but it was so genuine, so natural, and so important, that it’s all I could think of as I drove home.  I realized another word I would add to describe him: beautiful.

 This exchange is what most of the important moments of my life are like.  I visit with my children, I talk with the barista at the coffee shop, I trade laughs with my brother.  This is the quality of my life, these beautiful exchanges that matter.  Even the most trivial conversation contains in it this same beauty I saw in my friend at lunch.

 When you meet a celebrity, often the main result of that event is you get to tell people about the meeting.  There is little intrinsic value in the exchange.  I understand the thrill, it’s fun.  But it’s a saccharine experience, and unless Tom Hanks told you an excellent story or Desmond Tutu gave you life-changing advice, it pales in comparison to the beauty of the regular person.  The important person.

 What I hope can come of these words is to raise our awareness of the beauty of the important people all around us, virtually everyone who everyone knows.  They are smart, perhaps brilliant, caring, devoted to us.  They are fun, they are loving, they are talented, they are interesting, they have rich stories to share.  They are us, and we are them.

 We owe it to them, and ourselves, to show them the enthusiasm we may have reserved for a video of Paul Hollywood teaching Dwayne Johnson how to bake a tart.

 There’s an old joke where a guy tries to check into a hotel that is all booked up. He says “You mean to say if the president of the United States showed up, you don’t have a room for him?”  The hotel clerk says, of course they would accommodate the president.  The man says “The president isn’t coming.  I’ll take his room.”

 The message I wanted you to hear this morning is that we know instinctively that the ordinary people in our lives are more important than the kings and dancers and actors and politicians.  We know it, and we ignore it. 

 The president isn’t coming, give them the room. 

 

Hope this finds you with the beautiful people,

 

David

 

 

Copyright © 2022  David Smith

Austin

 

September 19, 2022

 

Greetings from where it’s weird,

 “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”  G.K. Chesterton

 The first thing I need to say about being here is that I don’t know where to look.  There are so many interesting things to see it feels selfish to simply rest your eyes in one place. 

 I’m twice as old as the average person.  I am among a tiny minority who do not have tattoos.  I do not have a ponytail, or cowboy boots, I do not wear an ironic hat.  If you wanted to stand out in a group of people who are so diverse and so eclectic, you might choose to be an ordinary-looking white guy. 

 The skyline of downtown Austin is an impressive array of glass towers and steel angles, sprinkled with scaffolding and cranes piecing together more of the same.  There is traffic and homeless people and busses and coffee shops and brewpubs and people on bikes, like many cities of its size.

 What is striking is the change the city makes as we cross into the East Side, where I’m writing this morning.  There is a distinct line that contains the hectic, shiny angular world, and protects the edge of this peaceful, softer place.  Cozy bungalows are tucked among the side streets, on lots so small it would be easy to sit in your kitchen and ask your neighbor to pass the salsa. 

 This section of the city is a neighborhood and it is a vibe, a cultural presence.  It is diverse and colorful and slightly tattered, a little bit overgrown.  It is charming and vibrant, artistic and creative, it is old and new, it is so many things at once I feel like I should slow down even more and absorb it. 

We are staying in a one-room sort of studio shed, nested in the corner of the lot behind a tin topped cottage, which we share with an outdoor ceramics studio.  The yard is filled with plants and ceramic things and old wrought iron chairs.  There are two miniature goats and an enormous tortoise, who I am told is only a teenager but seems much more mature.  There are crystal chandeliers hanging over the gardens.

 The streets are shaded from the merciless Texas sun by a canopy of mature trees.  There is sticky syrup on the pavement, a product of overactive aphids, which I wrote just because I like saying ‘overactive aphids’.  I mention this because as I ran through the east side it added a texture and a sound that was new company.

 I haven’t had much reason to have an opinion about gentrification.   While I haven’t spoken to anyone on the subject here, I suspect it’s a common conversation in the community.  The zero lot lines are slowly filling with updated homes, or replaced entirely with wild contemporary works that look like Elon Musk had a hand in the architecture.   The busier border streets are lined with restaurants and coffee shops and studios, and while they seem to fit with the East Side groove, the change, the creeping pace, is obvious.

 Yesterday I sat to write some notes at a small café, Cenotes, itself a crossroads between the old and new.  The house where the café serves is from 1889.  The family that started the place, a couple decades ago, is part of the East Side.  But it exists to serve everyone in this transition.  The original Texans, the locals who only arrived thirty years ago, and now ordinary white guy travelers like me.  The tourists who showed up on the ubiquitous Bird scooters.

 I was surrounded by variety, like nearly everywhere I visited.  Hipsters and hippies, trendy sorts with their trendy dogs,  upscale and downtrodden, all gathered on that corner to enjoy a good cup of coffee and a place to talk, or sit quietly.  It is quintessential East Side, funky and hip and also hurrying to get in step with what the city demands of it.

 Austin has such a rich and varied culture, it’s foolish to try to capture in one breath, and I know I have only seen a fraction.  Enough that I know I want to come back and explore more.

 There are the food trucks, which are a religion of sorts.  Everyone has a favorite, each has its nuance, each attracts a crowd for different things at different times. 

 Dogs seem to be everywhere, a kind of currency between strangers.  In parks and restaurants and shops and in line and on the sidewalks, they are a warm and friendly accessory in all the places we traveled. 

 We went two-step dancing at the Broken Spoke and kayaking on Lady Bird Lake and stood in awe of the surging and swirling bats as they set out into the night under the Congress Ave bridge.  We ate tacos.  If that sounds like all we ate was tacos, then I got that right.

 There’s more but there will always be more.  I wrote this sample not as a travelogue but as a reminder.  Where I come from, and probably where you are, there is a variety that is unique and interesting to visitors.  It may not have the reputation of weird Austin or Portland, but it has its own character, its own charm, and the same desire to be seen.  As much as I love the excitement of exploring a new place, it is also a wonderful reminder to explore the place I go home to.

  

Hope this finds you seeing with fresh eyes,

 

David

Eliza Fletcher

 

September 12, 2022

 

Greetings from the tribe,

 

Eliza Fletcher was my people.

She is my daughter, my sister, my wife, she is a distant cousin-in-law.  She is the perfect stranger that runs with me in the next marathon.  She is the woman I pass by in the dark winter mornings as we both train our bodies for whatever drives us.

She is a runner.  I won’t presume to know her motivation, her abilities, or her track record.  I can tell from what little I know that she was determined, dedicated, and devoted to her family, her students, and her faith.  And running. 

 I know she ran.  I know that, like many of our tribe, she found joy and solace in running, sometimes to ready herself for a marathon, sometimes to simply untwist from the demands of the rest of her full, rich life.  She slipped into the holy space we all cherish, this fragile but enduring place that waits just outside the rest of the world’s chaos.  And she ran. 

I know that in that mix of living and running someone shredded the bubble and wreaked havoc in her life. 

I know she is someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s daughter, someone’s teacher.  I know she had ‘boundless, childlike energy’ and that ‘..she was not afraid to be vulnerable.’ 

What she is not, what she is not, … is to blame.

 What caught my attention after her death was the reaction of some of the public about her ‘unsafe’ or ‘reckless’ behavior. Running at four in the morning, not taking appropriate precautions, not protecting herself against what we all know can happen.

 My only reason for writing this morning is to add another voice, from a male, to say this: let’s not ask the wrong question.  I don’t want the other members of my tribe to mistake silence for assent.  There is no value in finding the victim guilty. 

 I am tempted to tell you about the other runners murdered at all hours, regardless of what they wear or where they run.  It’s heartbreakingly easy to illustrate the pervasiveness of violence.  But my purpose isn’t to win a meaningless debate.

 In truth, I had already hardened myself to this tragic story.  I didn’t want to absorb it because I’d already reached my capacity for right now, and couldn’t take on another headline about senseless killing.  I read the lede, took a shallow breath, and set it aside.

 For many of the people I know, it has become a challenge to modulate the intake of news about violence.  You have to filter some of it or it threatens to swamp you.  So, you find yourself choosing what to become incensed about.  For some of us, it’s driven by race or gender, for others politics, and others only read stories that feature mass shooting deaths.  That’s the bar.

 When you wade into these parts of your life, you are led to questions about the human condition, and the answers, the solutions, are not coming.  So we ask other questions that maybe are easier.

 Whose fault was this?  Who should have seen this coming?  What should the authorities have done?  What should society do? Is it drugs, racism, parenting, society, right-wing/left-wing ideology?  Is it the street light companies?  The gun manufacturers?  Is it police response times?   How can this be stopped?  Wait, is it the victim, is that who is to blame?

 None of this conversation brings back the murdered, repairs the trauma, or prevents it from happening.  It’s just what we do while we let out our shallow breath.  It’s what we do while we wait for it to happen again.

 Except for today some of us are tearing off a piece of our collective anesthetic, just for this moment, and exposing this one simple truth.  The answer is not going to be to convict the victim. 

 I’m not naïve.  I know well enough to take the lessons the world offers in random violence and  I want my family and friends, and all of the people in my tribe, to be safe.  And if for today it means behaving differently, adapting, so that we can do what we choose while we live in a dangerous world, then we will do that.

 A member of our tribe is gone.  The reasons are tragic, the wake of her loss is enormous, and felt in pools of people who would otherwise never have known Eliza.  We mourn for her and for the pain her family is immersed in.  And each of us had the same thought about what we can do now, what we can do tomorrow and for all of the tomorrows left to us.  We can run.  For Eliza.

 Before I go, I want to share some words from another time when tragedy seared our tribe, because I feel it call to me, feel the spirit of who we are, resisting the terror of what would lessen us.  From April, 2013:

 We run to testify, and to push those around us, running with us, standing watching us, to do the same.  To say: we commit to be the best we can for ourselves and for each other.

 We run to test ourselves.  To improve.  To inspire.  To remember.  To represent.  To compete.  We run not to be separate from the world but to bring the world with us.  To testify.  To give witness that even in this simple act we can be as one people.  We can rise above the gray dimness that threatens humanity and hold the light high, for ourselves and for those who would run with us.  

There is not enough world to hold us back.  Not enough violence or disdain or hate or ridicule or fear or cynicism or doubt.  We will run again, not because we are elite or different or special, but because we are meant to run, as humans, as companions.  We are meant to express ourselves in this way.  I believe it.

 In Hopkinton, 26.2 miles from Boston, behind the blue and gold starting line, with its iconic unicorn, we wait. There is a moment before the big gun goes off, when the anticipation is palpable, and you can feel tens of thousands of people lean forward, eager for the first step.  And you look into the eyes of the runner next to you, and you see the miles and the pain and the time and the tears and the failure and the challenge and beginning again and failing and never ever giving up.  It is the human condition, the spirit that keeps us from giving in to what would make us less than what we are meant for.  And then we take the first step, and run with all we have into the space the world has made. 

 We will run again.

  

Hope this finds you running free,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2022  David Smith

Sixty Drawers

 

September 5, 2022

Greetings from the truth hacks,

I have a built-in workbench in my garage, an altar to industriousness, with all manner of storage for tools and parts and projects.  It is a fine specimen of organization, featuring drawers and shelves and boxes, all evenly coated with dust from unuse, which good intentions have not disturbed.  

Featured prominently among this display of hypocrisy is an upright, square metal display featuring sixty small clear drawers.  It is described as a ‘Parts Organizer’, often featured in optimistic articles like ’10 Hacks for an Effective Workbench’.  (As a sidenote, I am starting a petition to have the word ‘hack’ reclaimed as a word meaning ‘cut with rough or heavy blows, to cut, chop, hew’.  You can sign it below.)  

Before the days when people were hacking their marriages, recipes, children, religions, etc., I bought this organizer for screws and nails and small things I don’t want to forget I have.  

When I purchased it, heart full of naïve intention, already envisioning satisfying hours of creating and repairing things with my hands, I had very few small things to manage.  This was many years ago, perhaps the Reagan era, which I mention not because of the optimism involved or the fact I was so flush with trickle-down cash I could afford such a luxury, but simply to establish how old this device is.  What’s really astonishing is not just the age, but also that I still have it despite the fact it is has proven to be utterly useless.

I think it was a denim blue color originally, an irrelevant fact I thought I’d include to confuse you in the off chance you are still reading hoping to uncover a ‘hack’.  In some moments, I enjoy seeing it there on the bench, a piece of art, protecting a small rectangle of space from dust.  It is a little apartment for loose screws.  It is a refuge for orphaned nuts. It is a resting place for errant rivets.  It is a mausoleum for miscellanea.  

Inside the drawers are a mélange of detritus.  There are fuses from an era when houses had fuses.  There are spacers and washers, nuts, screws, nails, bolts, hooks.  There is a hinge.  There are S-hooks and cup hooks and suction cup hooks.  There are mollies and brackets and bearing rings.  There is a spring.  There are many examples of the widowed remains of a pair.

There are several parts of something that I deliberately put in there, knowing that I would need them one day.  That is my self-imposed curse, this empty promise that I made to myself in more innocent times.  

Occasionally I will need to fix something and discover I need, say, a corksprocket.  The last thing I want to do is make a trip to the hardware store to buy a box of corksprockets when I already own some.  So, a little diligence is necessary.

I will go to the little drawers and look in the windows, which is merely a warmup exercise.  There is no way of telling what is in each drawer by looking through the scarred plastic ends.  Everything looks like corksprockets from that perspective, and I will testify that truth disguises another truth.

In order to determine that other truth, one must open sixty drawers.  

I will also confess that I cannot open sixty little drawers without forgetting which of the sixty I have opened, leaving some doubt as to the veracity of my inventorying and the potential existence of corksprockets.  This leads to opening and closing the sixty drawers something like one hundred times, having little reunions with my various tenants, who have no more memory of me than I of them.  

I will also acknowledge that partway through this process I forget that I am looking for corksprockets.  Occasionally I will have a false ‘Eureka’ moment for an 8mm locknut, which perhaps in other circumstances might be a happy discovery.  If only I had an authentic need for my old friend.

Those of you with advanced degrees in statistics, or actuarial analysis, or perhaps astrology, might estimate that opening the drawers one hundred times would not be necessary if I actually found the corksprockets at some point.  And so, you have discovered the other truth about the sixty drawers:  they never ever have what you are looking for.

I’ll confess even as I begin the search process I know the futility, and yet I do it.  It may be a psychological compulsion, or masochistic hopefulness, or perhaps the powerful parsimony that drives it all: I don’t want to waste another $1.89 on corksprockets that may, against all odds, reside in the library of misfit parts.  There may come a day when I put down this burden, but not while I have the need for money or incidental pieces of repairable possessions which I could probably more economically replace with new.  Or do without.

Henry Thoreau probably said: “Do not own more things than you can remember.”  If he didn’t it is because he didn’t own a ‘Parts Organizer’, and he lived in the pristine days before corksprockets.  Ah, let us return to Walden, where there was no reason for tiny plastic windows and the only hacking was caused by the need for firewood.

Hope this finds you seeing where you looked,

David

Copyright © 2022  David Smith