Month: February 2020

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Getting Your Duckies in a Row

The yarn almost clotheslined me as I entered the front room.

“What on Earth?…”

“Sorry!” Heather called out, laughing. “I forgot you’d be walking through here.”

Heather had been busy with our 9-year-old niece, the ever-inventive Riley. Together, the two of them had strung two sharply angled lines of yellow yarn from the bay window to the floor, securing them at each end with packing tape.

“It’s for Ducky,” Heather explained. Riley picked up her ever-present toy duck – the fuzz long since worn smooth by years of loving – clipped him to a coat hanger and hung it at the top of the yarn.

ZOOM! Riley laughed. Heather smiled. I stared agape. They’d built a zip line, sending him as smoothly to the ground as any Colorado rock climber could ask for.

As God is my witness, I didn’t know Duckies could fly.

I suppose by now I should be used to the ingenuity of our younger relations. But that’s the thing about imagination – it keeps creating its own wonder and appreciation. For a moment, you get a flash into someone else’s thinking and it expands your own.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never been that good with my hands, but I’m especially impressed by life’s builders. Particularly in a situation like this where you have limited materials, and manage to create something useful.

That’s not a bad example to have as we head into the primary season.

OK, don’t run and hide. I know that we’ve had election reminders, advertisements, and soapboxes on every side – on the screen, in the mail, on the doorstep, all over the media – and it’s only going to get more intense as we shift from the primaries to the general election. This isn’t a soapbox for one particular candidate … not at the rates they’re offering, anyway.
So why bring it up here? Because like invention, elections are an attempt to get from the ideal to the real with the materials you have.

And sometimes those materials are more limited than we’d like.

We’ve all seen it in so many elections. Nobody gets everything they want. We all have our ideal candidate with just the right resume who would touch all the right issues in just the right way to establish justice, prosperity, and half-price banana splits at Dairy Queen.

And then the actual candidates appear. And they’re … people. Ones with … well, maybe some of what we want. But we start wading through this one’s history, and that one’s attitude, and the one who trips on their tongue every three sentence. Sooner or later, someone says it: “Are these really the only choices we have?”

I am convinced that we could have the reincarnations of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fred Rogers walk into the room and we’d still find ourselves asking that question.  Even at its best, politics invites criticism and challenge; at its most vicious, it can make a Broncos-Raiders game look like a tea party.

We’re not getting everything we want. Any of us.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t build something with what we have available.

And that’s what all this is about. Building something that makes this a better place for all of us.

Sure, you still have to use your judgment. Not all materials are equally useful and some may burn down the house entirely. But if we focus on what needs to be built – if we keep the hope that something CAN be built, and work toward it – even a limited tool box can make a difference.

It may not look like much. It may be totally improvised. But if we keep working at it, we just might surprise ourselves with the results.

And that would be just Ducky.

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Riddle Me This

Silence had reigned for a while.  For a moment, I wondered if I’d made things too difficult this time.

Then, the messages began popping up on my phone.

“Shred, lasso, trap,” one mused over the puzzle I’d left. “Terrapin?”

I checked, the clues did indeed translate to “tear, rope, pin.”

“CORRECT!”

Another came in, deducing that “lose it, quick text” actually meant “snap, ping.” And another, turning an especially convoluted wordplay into “teenage mutant ninjas.” Before long, most of the “Turtles” category had been uncovered.

Another Riddle Night was under way.

It’s probably my most curious hobby. Lots of people read. Plenty of people act with a theatre group, or play tabletop games, or fool around with a musical instrument. But the number of folks who create riddles for a group of friends to solve … well, I won’t say it approaches zero, but it is clearly a specialty entertainment.

I inherited the title of the Riddlemaster a while ago. Like many things, it started with a Facebook group, in this case centered around the humorous and thoughtful “Callahan’s Place” stories of the writer Spider Robinson. The tavern where Robinson’s science fiction stories were set had compassion, revelry, and near-constant puns – all things we could readily duplicate in a virtual environment.

But one of the more occasional features of the stories was Riddle Night, where one of the patrons would pick an unspoken theme and then write several related riddles on the board. Each successful guess scored a point; the winner had his or her drink tab cleared and got to be Riddlemaster next time if they chose.

We obviously couldn’t do anything about the drink tab in an online “saloon.” But the rest, with some effort, was doable. We added some more time (most of a weekend rather than just one night) and the caveat that if the winner didn’t feel up to the challenge of next week’s riddles, they could “pass the microphone” back to the default Riddlemaster – which, after the first few months, became me – and we were off.

OK, we were clearly off. But a little insanity never hurts for something like this.

By now, the topics have been myriad. Poker hands. Middle-earth. Heroes and villains. If you name it, we can riddle it – and maybe even crack it.

It takes a lot of mental effort, both to forge the riddles and to solve them. But it’s worth every drop of cranial sweat. In many ways, it uses the same parts of the brain that a good pun does, but in slightly different ways.

It forces you to look at meanings and see whether there’s something you hadn’t considered.

It makes you look for patterns and connections, veering away from the unproductive ones and zeroing in when the evidence becomes clear.

At times, it encourages you to work together – someone else’s wrong guess may have the key to your own solution.

In short, it makes you think, be aware, and pay attention to others.

That’s never a bad thing. Especially these days.

We don’t spend a lot of time trying to understand any more. Maybe that too is a specialty interest. It’s always easier to mobilize the troops and concentrate the folks who think just like you, to reinforce old habits and strengthen existing beliefs, than it is to try to see where someone else is coming from. It’s harder to feel where another person hurts – or harder still, to see where you’ve hurt someone else yourself – and reach out to help them out.

Harder. But essential. For all of us.

How do we get there? That’s a riddle indeed. But one well worth the solving.

And like the turtle riddles, the first step is to come out of your shell and try.

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A New Direction

When the director says you gave a fantastic audition, you usually didn’t get the part. And I didn’t.

But this one had a surprise for me.

“I wonder if you might be interested in being the assistant director.”

My response may have set land speed records at Daytona.

“Absolutely!”

After a long time away, I was back on the bridge.

If your life hasn’t included the wonderful vistas of community theatre, you may not be aware of the invisible world that exists away from center stage. (You may also be a lot less sleep-deprived and have a much more normal sense of humor, but I digress.) Behind the performers who spin the stories and create the characters are an entire army of people, all of them dedicated to keeping that secondary reality alive and vibrant.

Most of those folks have pretty specific jobs – the light designer, the props master/mistress, the crew chief for building the sets, and so on. Some are wider-ranging: the producer who oversees the logistics, the stage manager who keeps the show running smoothly when the curtain rises, and of course, the director who brings it all together with their own unique vision.

Assistant directing is a little different. The job has basically two pieces:

  • Whatever the director wants it to be, and
  • Whatever you make it, within the constraints of part one.

A few directors turn this into a “gofer” but most know better. In essence, the AD is a second brain, a second set of hands and eyes, and a filler-in of missing pieces.

A director who’s more creative than organized may have an AD who helps create plans and schedules.

A director who’s not technically savvy may choose one who can translate their ideas to the technical director (or in smaller companies, may also BE the technical director).

And any director who can’t be everywhere – which is all of them until we manage to invent that pesky time machine – benefits from having someone who can see the action from a different angle, think about the scene from a different perspective, go over the notes and say “Have you considered …?”

Speaking as someone who’s been a director long ago and far away (in that otherworldly dimension of Kansas), those gifts can be invaluable. It’s that “click” that creates peanut butter and jelly, John Williams and Star Wars, three-day weekends and a full tank of gas – good by themselves, but even better together.

And the best part is, you don’t have to be a theater person to get it.

Most of us have the chance to be someone else’s missing piece, if we think to look for it. A lot of us don’t. We focus on our own needs, we look for familiar situations. And when we do team up, we often look for someone just like ourselves – no risk of conflict, but limited chances to grow.

It’s when we step outside what we’ve known that the magic can happen. To not just pursue our own needs and visions, but help others with theirs.

The more we do it, the more opportunities we see. And the easier it gets to accept help when we need it ourselves.

And personally, I can’t wait to see what this opportunity brings.  My notebook is ready. My eyes are open. My mind is eager.

The invisible world awaits.

Let’s go set the stage.

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A Long Time Coming

This year, another of the long, painful legacies finally came down.

OK, my friends who are Cubs and Red Sox fans are probably laughing themselves silly. After all, when your wait for vindication approaches or even exceeds the century mark, that’s a special kind of pain right there. Never mind the poor, hurting teacher I knew who was both a Cubs AND a Red Sox fan – an exercise in masochism if there ever was one.

Still, 50 years between championships is long enough to wait. And so, despite my own passion for the division rival Denver Broncos, I couldn’t help cheering along with my friends and family from Kansas and Missouri (yes, I know my geography) as the Kansas City Chiefs finally brought home the big one.

Naturally, they didn’t do it easily. The Chiefs rarely do anything easily. Every single playoff game, right up to the Super Bowl itself, had the same script:

  • Come in full of promise, heralded as one of the best teams in the NFL.
  • Fall behind. Maybe way
  • Find a way back that John Elway himself would envy.

If the last five decades could be translated into a single football game, that’s about what it would look like. And it’s why Chiefs fans went absolutely nuts afterward and a lot of the rest of us with them. The wait is painful. But the end is all the more glorious for it.

But putting it that way overlooks something.

It assumes that all you have to do is wait. Have patience, and the good things will happen.

That’s never been true. In football or the larger world.

For the last five years, the musical “Hamilton” has been a phenomenon on Broadway. Part of the attraction is the contrast between the show’s version of Alexander Hamilton – energetic, impatient, fighting to burn his name in the history of the world – and Aaron Burr, a charming man who plays his cards close to the chest, waiting for the right opportunity to show itself. At a crucial moment, when Alexander has just cut a deal to put his long-sought national bank in place, he taunts his rival:

 

When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game,

But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game,                          

You get love for it, you get hate for it,

You get nothing if you wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.

 

There’s nothing wrong with playing the long game. In fact, it’s vital. Most rapid revolutions fail, and many of the ones that succeed turn on themselves – the English saw it with Cromwell, the French with Napoleon, the Russians with Lenin and Stalin. The movements for change that win have a foundation underneath that is built from a long span of patient and often-frustrating work.

But the work has to happen.

If the Chiefs had blown off the draft year after year – if their fans had never bought a single ticket or tuned in any of the sponsored games – there’d be no trophy, and probably no Chiefs.

If the American colonies had never made a single move toward self-sufficiency over the decades that preceded the Revolution, the fight would have failed, if it had come at all.

If the civil rights movement had waited for rights to just happen, instead of constantly working, constantly struggling, constantly refusing to be put down despite yet one more failure, all of America would be poorer for it.

It’s still true today. Transformation doesn’t come from a single election. Victory or defeat in a cause doesn’t stem from a single action on Capitol Hill. Those are just individual notes in a greater melody. What makes the difference is constancy – not quitting, not turning away, taking the time that needs to be taken without assuming that all that’s needed is time.

Victory is never guaranteed. But it’s that sort of stubborn persistence in pursuit of it that can shape lives. Or histories. Or even the occasional sports franchise.

It’s no fun to endure. But the reward is worth it.

Just ask the Chiefs.

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The Bindings That Tie

Some phone calls can transform an entire evening.

“I’m very pleased to tell you that the book is finally in.”

Ding-ding-ding! Never mind trying to find downtown parking near Barbed Wire Books on a Friday night. Never mind the chill of a January evening. This treasure had been a long time in coming, and it was perfect.

A used copy, for affordability.

Clearly in excellent condition.

And most importantly, the true object of my quest: a hardcover binding.

No wonder this one had taken months to search out. How often do you surrender a high-quality copy of The Lord of the Rings?

If you’re a regular here, you know that JRR Tolkien holds a high spot in my personal pantheon of heroes, both for the richness of his creation and the family history that it’s bound together. Dad introduced me to the lands of Middle-earth when I was in third grade, and from then until the early days of college, we read and re-read The Hobbit and his three-volume Lord of the Rings together. We pored over his old Ballantine paperbacks until they fell apart, got him a new set for Christmas, then started again.

Shortly after I got married to Heather (who is every bit as geeky as me), I found and quickly latched onto a single-volume paperback Lord of the Rings – a mass of paper that would probably stop a low-caliber bullet while leaving Elvish script embedded in it for good measure. That hefty tome followed us through the first 21 years of our marriage, coming along on camping trips, car trips, and numerous bedtime readings to an enraptured Missy.

It was during one of those Missy readings that the spine finally gave way, having provided service far beyond the ordinary literary call of duty. We finished its last reading in honor, laid it aside, and then began a new adventure. After all, if a thousand-page paperback book had lasted from the beginnings of Google to the ending of the first Marvel Cinematic Universe, how much longer would a hardcover hold up?

When you treasure something, you try to make it last.

And that’s true of more than just fantasy epics.

If you’ve owned a house or a car, you know the simple truth: maintenance is cheaper than repair. Take care of it and it will take care of you.

If you’ve exchanged rings and said “I do,” you learn a simple truth: that great wedding are far easier than great marriages. One is a singular event that is soon over; the other is an ongoing effort to build something anew every day.

And if you treasure a free nation, you know a simple truth: that it’s more than reciting the Pledge, learning the Declaration, and waking the neighbors on the Fourth of July. It takes work. It means facing up to what our country does and doesn’t do well, proud but clear-eyed at the same time. It means fighting to preserve what needs to be preserved, and to change what needs to be changed. It means speaking without fear, thinking beyond your own small piece of the picture, and building a nation that makes life better for all of us.

And most of all, it means holding our leaders accountable for the actions done in our name.

We’re not always good at that. Our brains like to simplify, and it’s easy to break things down into teams and colors and slogans – politics as sports, where the referee’s calls are just what “those guys” deserved but a gross injustice for “our guys.” Where right or wrong is less important than not giving in to the other side.

Breaking that is hard. And essential. We don’t have to be in lockstep – but without some common understanding and accountability, nothing worth keeping will endure.

When you treasure something, you try to make it last. Whether it’s the binding of a book, or the binding of a nation.

Hold it close. Bind it well.

And then, let it Ring.