Category: Living

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IBM Living

Meeting Cher

Some memories sit untouched for fifty years and then show up without warning. This one arrived yesterday, while I was thinking about our time in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.

Before moving to Montgomery County (and living there twice!), I spent some time at the IBM Washington Systems Center in Gaithersburg. The WSC had a very large computer room filled with the various IBM mainframe models that were current in that era.

I was then working for IBM in San Francisco, and one of my projects was responding to an RFP from the State of California for the Teale Datacenter. As part of that effort, we had to run a large benchmark supplied by the State to demonstrate the power and performance of the specific IBM configuration we were proposing. I spent a month at the WSC preparing for it and stayed at the Holiday Inn across the street.

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Categories
Creativity Curiosity Living Walking

The Silence of the Concrete Saint

I was alone in the car when I noticed, which is the wrong way to notice anything.

Something was off about the hillside above the Crystal Springs rest stop. I couldn’t have told you what. It took a mile, maybe more, for the shape of the absence to harden into a fact. The statue was gone.

Twenty-six feet of concrete sprayed over a steel frame. A robed Junípero Serra, kneeling, one arm thrust west toward the missions, set above Interstate 280 in the bicentennial year and left there to watch the Peninsula go by. A thing so large and so constant that the eye had stopped registering it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. And then, sometime in the last few months, nothing. A patch of bare earth. No one beside me to ask whether they’d seen it go.

This is what the road does. At highway speed the world beside the freeway is a blur you agree not to examine. The statue stood behind a locked gate, and the people who passed it by the hundred thousand did what the road trains everyone to do. They looked ahead.

It took a walk to catch up with it.

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Aging Living

On Holding Hands

A musing after Roger Rosenblatt’s “I Want to Hold Her Hand“

It is a Tuesday in early fall, the kind of afternoon that doesn’t announce itself as anything special, and Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, are walking somewhere they’ve probably walked a thousand times before. Their hands are together. Nobody watching them would think twice about it, because two old people holding hands on a sidewalk is one of the least remarkable sights in America. That’s the whole point. It isn’t remarkable. It’s just true.

Here’s what you’d need to know about them, if you were the kind of person who noticed. They held hands in high school, decades before either of them had a name for what that meant. They’ve held hands through the ordinary accumulation of a life — the mortgage, the kids, the funerals, the doctor’s appointments, the small emergencies that never make it into any story anyone tells at a dinner party.

And now they’re old, and the hands doing the holding aren’t the hands that started this.

Rosenblatt writes about the veins, the discoloration, the wrinkles like roads on a map nobody drew on purpose, and you get the sense he’s spent a lot of quiet time looking down at his own hand, trying to place when exactly it stopped belonging to the boy who first reached for a girl’s hand in some hallway sixty-some years ago.

There’s a version of this story in every small town in the country, if you know where to look. The couple at the diner counter splitting a slice of pie — not out of economy anymore, just habit. The man in the church parking lot with his hand under his wife’s elbow instead of around her fingers, because her balance isn’t what it was, and calling it the same thing anyway. Because it is the same thing.

Love, at this age, isn’t the version you see in the movies. It’s structural. Load-bearing. It’s what keeps two people upright once the friends have started dying off and the noise of the world has gone quiet around them.

Rosenblatt calls himself and Ginny a shaky Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods. But read it again. They’re not lost. They’ve been down this path before, more times than either of them could count, and they know it by feel now, the way you know a staircase in the dark — not because you can see it, but because your hand remembers where the rail is.

Take my hand. Not to find the way. Because you already know it, and I want to walk it with you anyway.

Categories
Dayton Ohio Fathers Living

Three Machines

A worn IBM Selectric typewriter sitting beside a small offset printing press in a modest Berkeley print shop, late afternoon light through a storefront window, warm and slightly nostalgic, documentary photography style, no text or people visible.

I’m a chapter into Jeff Jarvis’s new book Hot Type. It tells the Linotype’s story from the top down — the tragic inventors, the media moguls, Mark Twain bankrupting himself on a rival machine. Publishers Weekly calls it “colorful and enthralling,” and the part I’ve read is. But reading it, I kept thinking about a story it doesn’t tell: not the story of one machine, but of a man who lived through three.

The first machine

My dad, Carl, was a Linotype operator, and later a foreman, at Dayton Typographic Service in the 1950s. The Linotype histories always start with Ottmar Mergenthaler, the engineer who built the machine in 1886, and they linger on the tycoons who bought fleets of them. That’s the inventor’s history.

The operator’s history starts with a man at a 90-key keyboard — arranged by letter frequency, which is why the most famous typo in newspaper history reads “etaoin shrdlu,” the mark of a finger run down the first two columns to flag a mistake. It continues with molten lead at 550 degrees, the clank and hiss of the caster, a smell that got into your clothes and never quite came out.

The Linotype didn’t deskill typesetting; it reskilled it. The hand compositors it replaced — the Swifts, who once held typesetting races before paying audiences of thousands — saw a centuries-old craft wither. But the machine demanded its own expertise: reading copy and keyboarding at speed, hearing a misaligned mold before it ruined a line, keeping a finicky foundry running through a deadline night. My dad’s generation learned that machine the way a musician learns an instrument.

On Saturday mornings he’d take me along while he caught up on work. I was watching a trade at its peak — I just didn’t know the peak was already behind it.

The second machine

Phototypesetting killed the Linotype the way the Linotype had killed hand-composition. My dad didn’t ride that one out. He left Dayton and, in Berkeley, opened a small offset print shop on Oxford Street, across from the Cal campus. The 90-key keyboard became an IBM Selectric; molten lead became offset plates. It was a real re-skilling, not a small one — a different machine, a different trade, at an age when most people stop learning new ones.

The third machine

The shop found its footing on a strange, narrow market: Berkeley then required graduate theses to be printed, not “Xeroxed,” and there was steady, respectable work in doing properly what a photocopier could only do badly. For a while, that requirement was the business.

It didn’t last. The rule changed, the copier got good enough, and the market my dad had built his second act on simply stopped existing — the same way the compositor’s market had stopped existing, the same way the Linotype operator’s had. Three machines, three trades, one man standing on each shrinking piece of ground in turn.

Whose story is it

Linotype histories, as a genre, get written about the men who owned the machines and the men who built them. Even the operator’s history — when someone bothers to tell it — usually stops at one displacement, as if a man who loses his trade to a machine either finds a permanent new one or doesn’t. My dad found three, in succession, each one narrower than the last, and the history of that — of re-skilling as a way of life rather than a one-time event — doesn’t get written at all. It just gets lived, by somebody’s father, and remembered, if it’s lucky, by somebody’s son.

Categories
Dayton Ohio Living Memories

The Closing of the Pool

Swimming Pool - Closing Day

The pool in Kettering closed on Labor Day. Not gradually — the way a door closes, on a schedule posted near the snack bar that nobody read until the week it mattered. There was a cookout. Hot dogs, cooked by somebody’s father on a grill that had done nothing all June and July, lighter fluid competing with the smell that actually defined those afternoons: chlorine, always a little too much of it, eyes stinging on the walk home, your suit smelling like a chemistry set for two more days. That smell is the whole memory, if I’m honest. The last cannonball, the lifeguard’s whistle going quiet, somebody’s mother folding a towel like a flag — scaffolding around the smell.

Then school started. Not the next day, but soon. Labor Day was the hinge the year turned on. Summer didn’t fade in the Midwest. It ended, on a Monday, with hot dogs.

I live near Stanford now, close enough to walk the campus most weekends, and I’ve noticed something it took me years to actually notice. The campus is empty for most of September — not weekend-empty, but empty the way a place is empty when the people who belong there haven’t arrived yet. The quad sits there doing nothing. There’s a stillness that has nothing to do with the calendar most people keep and everything to do with a school year that doesn’t start moving in until the middle of the month, classes later still, while thirty miles away the local public school kids have already been at their desks for three or four weeks — in what by Kettering standards would still count as deep, unambiguous summer.

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Aging Living

The Manufacture of Emergency

The screens at Visa never went dark. Somewhere in a data center, transactions were clearing at a rate that made the number itself feel abstract, and our job was to sit inside that river and notice the one drop moving wrong. A fraud ring testing stolen numbers in ascending increments. A merchant category code that didn’t match the geography. A velocity spike that looked, if you squinted, like nothing at all, until it didn’t. The work had a shape to it: quiet, then a pattern surfaces, then the chase, then the catch or the near-miss, then quiet again. I didn’t think of it as drama at the time. I thought of it as Tuesday.

It took me a long time to notice that the shape of that work was also the shape of something in me, and that I’d built a career, without quite meaning to, out of environments that manufactured the same cycle over and over. Fraud detection was one. A Piper Cherokee is another — not because flying is reckless, it isn’t, competent flying is the opposite of reckless, but because every cross-country trip contains a small structured emergency built into the planning itself: the weather that might close in, the fuel math that has to work, the decision point where you commit or you divert. You solve it. You land. The relief is real and it is, if you’re honest with yourself, part of what you came for.

Retirement removes all of that. Nobody hands you a fraud queue. There is no fuel gauge counting down over Ohio. What retirement hands you instead is something much harder to sit inside: an undifferentiated stretch of days with no built-in shape, no crisis with a clock on it, no adversary to defeat by five o’clock. I did not expect this to be difficult. I had spent decades, if you’d asked me, wanting exactly this — quiet, unstructured time, the absence of alarms. And for the first while it was wonderful. Then I noticed I had opened a second screen.

The options positions started small and reasonable, the way these things do. A covered call here, a defined-risk spread there, sized so that nothing could actually hurt. But I noticed the pull on days when nothing needed attention. I’d be three-quarters through a walk around the pond, the morning doing exactly what a morning is supposed to do, and I’d feel for my phone anyway, not because a position needed managing but because the quiet had started to feel like something unresolved. I would open the app looking, if I am being precise about it, less for information than for a small manufactured stake — something with a clock on it, something I could watch move against me and then, with luck, defeat.

This is not a confession about trading, which when done with defined risk and a plan is just a hobby with numbers attached. It’s an admission about what I was actually shopping for on those walks, which was the old shape. Tension, then resolution. Fear, then relief. The problem with the shape is that it doesn’t ask whether the underlying situation warrants it. It just asks to be fed. A market that is genuinely quiet gets treated the same as a fraud queue with a live threat in it, because the appetite doesn’t distinguish between real stakes and stakes you went looking for. You can tell yourself you’re staying sharp. Sometimes you’re just bored, and bored, for a person built the way I apparently am, does not feel like rest. It feels like a low hum of unfinished business, and unfinished business is a thing I have spent a working lifetime being paid to resolve.

I don’t think this gets solved so much as it gets noticed, and noticing changes the ratio a little. The phone is always in my pocket; that isn’t the part I can negotiate with. What I’ve started doing instead is naming the moment my hand goes for it on a walk that doesn’t need interrupting — catching the reach itself, mid-motion, and asking what exactly I’m expecting to find. Most mornings I still open the app. But I open it now as someone watching himself do it, which is a smaller thing than stopping, and also, it turns out, not nothing.

Categories
Living Memories

The Depth of the Dimes

The lifeguard came out with a canvas bag, and that was the signal. Saturday morning, Kettering, Ohio, the municipal pool not yet warmed by the day, and forty kids arranging themselves along the edge like something had been rehearsed, though nobody had rehearsed it. We knew the shape of the thing without being told. He would walk to about the middle of the deck, and he would start throwing coins into the water.

Not pennies, mostly. I remember that distinctly, the way you remember the specifics of a thing you can’t explain the pull of. Nickels and dimes, a scattering of quarters, no half dollars that I ever saw hit the surface. Somebody in the recreation department had made a decision about denominations, a budget, maybe, or a sense of what a Saturday morning was worth to forty kids in Ohio in the summer, and none of us thought about that then. We watched the coins fall instead. That’s the part I keep returning to — not the diving, the falling. Coins don’t drop through water the way they drop through air. They wobble. They catch light and lose it. They take their time getting to the bottom, and you’d track one the way you’d track a hawk, losing it, finding it again against the pool floor, memorizing the spot before it disappeared into the general scatter of everything else he’d thrown.

We tried to angle ourselves near the shallow end, obviously. That was the whole strategy, such as it was — get positioned somewhere you could stand, somewhere your ears wouldn’t need to fight the pressure, somewhere the breath-holding would be a formality instead of a genuine risk. But the lifeguard wasn’t interested in making it easy. He’d throw a few coins shallow, just enough to keep the little kids occupied, and then he’d load up the deep end, and that’s where the real money went down. If you wanted more than a couple of nickels, you had to go where you couldn’t stand.

Then the countdown, and then all of us at once, forty kids hitting the water in the same three seconds, which meant the water itself turned against you before you’d even started looking — churned, clouded, chlorine stinging worse than usual because now there were elbows in it, knees, someone’s foot near your face. I wasn’t especially good at it. I want to say that plainly, because I don’t think I was; I’d come up with a handful, four or five coins, sometimes a quarter if I’d gotten lucky with the angle, and that felt like enough. Enough to matter. Enough to walk back to the locker room afterward with my trunks pocket sagging and clinking, enough to spend the rest of the morning transferring nickels and dimes into my actual pants pocket like a kid who’d earned something.

There was a boy down the street whose father worked at NCR, and some Saturdays he’d disappear to Old River instead — a real pool, he made sure we knew, an enormous one, with none of this scrounging-for-change business. I remember being aware of that difference without being able to name what it meant. He had the better pool. We had the lifeguard with the canvas bag.

I came across a piece online the other day, something about swimming and what it might mean, the kind of essay that circles a simple physical act until it turns into a meditation on something larger, and it knocked this memory loose after forty years of sitting untouched. I don’t know why that particular Saturday ritual is the one that stayed. Not the swimming lessons, not the diving board, not anything a person would call a memory on purpose. Just the coins going down, and all of us watching them go, already planning where we’d be standing when the countdown ended.

Categories
Living Walking

The Heron at Sharon Park

The heron did not fly.

Herons stand in water every morning of the world. Most don’t fly when a man walks past on a gravel path. But this one was close — close enough to see the yellow ring around its eye like a struck coin, the black cap combed back into two sharp feathers, a heron dressed for church. It considered me, or the water, or nothing at all, holding a stillness that costs a heron nothing and would cost me everything.

Sharon Park keeps a rotating cast of herons the way other places keep pigeons — gray, ill-tempered looking, small monks set down among the ducks. Usually they see me first and go up off the water in that ungainly unfolding, all elbows, and I’m left with the consolation of having glimpsed something before it left. This one let me stay. Let me get close enough to think the word friendly, though I know better — what I was seeing was a fish, or the absence of one, some interior calculus that had nothing to do with me. I was not a guest. I was weather.

It stood on one leg in green water, a green wall of reflected trees behind it, the low light turning that whole ceiling of water the color of a bottle. Its double stood beneath it, upside down, exact, patient as the original. Two herons for the price of one — one of feather, one of light, and I couldn’t have told you which was more real. The one in the water bent its neck into a shape the standing bird hadn’t made yet. It knew something the standing bird didn’t know, or had already forgotten.

Bubbles rose between them, a seam breaking the skin of the pond in a line, as though something down there were breathing, or as though the pond had decided, just this once, to show its work. Gas, probably, some decaying business at the bottom. But it looked like punctuation — the pond trying to say something and getting only as far as a string of commas before losing the thought.

I stood there longer than the moment required. This is what a heron does, if it lets you close and doesn’t leave: it makes you overstay. I thought about how little the bird was doing and how much I was doing to it — assigning it moods, welcoming it into my morning, when the truth was likely that it was simply waiting, the way I wait for coffee to cool, without company, without me. And yet it let me stay. Whatever arithmetic decided that, I was on the right side of it, for once, on an ordinary morning, my shoes going damp at the toe from standing too close to the edge.

Eventually I walked on, the way the heron surely expected I would, since staying is not a thing men do at ponds. I looked back once. It hadn’t moved. Its reflection hadn’t moved. The bubbles were still rising in their careful, aimless line — saying nothing, saying everything, the pond continuing to be a pond after I’d stopped watching it be one.

Categories
Food and Drink Living

The Toast

The bread came out dark, most days — darker than it needed to be. I never said anything. She’s gone now, and the sandwich has become a kind of monument, and you don’t deface a monument.

It was Wonder Bread, always — the wrapper with the balloons, bought on the same trip as the milk. My father’s favorite bread was Roman Meal, for his sandwiches with cold cuts, ham and bologna. Not with this one, though. The BLT got Wonder Bread. No special reason for it. Just the reason a family has for anything: once, and then always.

Kraft mayonnaise, from the jar. The same jar for everything else. Mom did not experiment. She had the regular things she made, and made them the same way every time.

Dad was picky about most food. This one he ate. I don’t know why. Maybe nothing beats bacon fat and tomato juice. Maybe it got in early, before he’d built his defenses, and stayed in by seniority.

No pickles in her BLTs. I didn’t miss them then. We use Claussen slices now, cut flat for this exact purpose, and good farmers’ market tomatoes when the season allows it.

Lunch, mostly. Rarely dinner.

Past a certain point, toast stops helping the tomato and starts blocking it. Hers had crossed that point, most days. I ate it anyway. Said nothing.

We make our own now, on sourdough, and it has never once tasted like hers. Not technique. You don’t get the sandwich back — any more than the kitchen, or the summer, or a mother at the counter making lunch for a picky man and a son who never once told her.

Note: inspired by the article “The Secret to a Perfect BLT Isn’t What You Think” by J.J. Goode in the New York Times.

Categories
Business Games Living

A Good Life Is an Infinite Game Played Well

I keep coming back to the eight CEOs in William Thorndike’s The Outsiders.

On paper they were capital allocators of unusual discipline. Looked at another way, they were people who had figured out how to play a long game inside systems designed to reward short ones. They treated the company as something that should still be healthy decades later, not as a vehicle for the next announcement or the next victory lap. Per-share value compounded quietly over time mattered more than size, applause, or the quarterly scoreboard. They were willing to look wrong for years. And most of them had little interest in the theater of the charismatic chief executive. Their authority accumulated the slow way — through decisions that held up after the noise moved on.

It is the same stance James Carse described in an infinite game: a game whose purpose is not to win but to keep the play going. You are never finished, only ahead or behind, and the position worth wanting is often the one that feels slightly behind — the one that still demands invention.

Micky Malka, describing the founders he most wants to back, named a similar cluster of qualities: the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner. People built that way don’t need the room to agree they’re winning. The Outsiders ran on a quieter version of the same current — their edge was steadiness more than brilliance, the nerve to ignore the wrong scoreboard for as long as it took.

A good life asks for the same thing. Not trophies lined up on a shelf, but the willingness to keep playing with attention — to keep learning, to keep showing up without needing anyone in the room to say you’re ahead. That’s lifelong learning.

Henry Singleton ran Teledyne for almost three decades and rarely bothered to explain any decision to Wall Street. He wasn’t playing to be believed. He was playing to still be at the table thirty plus years on.