Thanksgiving

The fastest growing hobby in this country is Being Offended. I know people who spend two or three hours a day looking for things to be pissed off about, now. And with the rise of the Internet, the offended now have access to what we call Community, other like-minded and similarly offended folks who reinforce the idea that Something Must Be Done, as opposed to cautioning one another to Just Get Over It.

The result of the joining of the offended with one another is the backlash. How dare you [enjoy/participate/celebrate] this, that or the other thing, knowing how many [indigenous peoples/innocent animals/children/others] were [exploited/killed/cheated/inconvenienced] in the name of this holiday.

I'm done with that.

Christopher Columbus was on his way to India when he bumped into us. That's why my father's family are called Indians today, when they have lived their entire lives in South Dakota and Nebraska. Sure, Columbus brought the pox and VD and all manner of other ills, and took whatever he wanted to take back. But realistically, I don't see how anyone can make it right, now and why spend all of those calories being worked-up about something nobody can change anyway?

Flash ahead a hundred and twenty-eight years, and the Pilgrims also came aground here. This story has been washed clean of just about all of its truth in the nearly four hundred years since, but I have to admit I like the myth better. The idea that the first Thanksgiving was a feast, that it was the Pilgrims who invited the Indians to join them, that everyone was all clean and shiny in their buckled shoes. Maybe after four hundred years you get a pass. I don't know.

I just don't have much patience with people who sit in the back of the room at the party and say things like, "You know, the millennium doesn't really start tonight..." or "You know, the Pilgrims would have starved if the Indians hadn't shared that day..." or "You know, this used to be a Pagan holiday..."

I come from a place a little different from most people, I'm sure. Peter Mayer said it all for me in his song, Holy Now. I'm not happy giving thanks on only a single day every year, and maybe particularly not this day, but I understand an awful lot of people are too busy to even notice, and so for them having a holiday is probably a good idea. Let's all step back, count our blessings and take a deep breath. And besides, there's turkey and dressing and football and tires at 40% off and we have to rest up for Black Friday shopping.

I am thankful. I have great friends, and great family (except for one guy). I have a great home and a great job and I get to share all of this with my favorite wife. Yeah, I fell and broke my foot on Hallowe'en, but it could have been so much worse.

I have a lot of nice things, and I have a lot of good-enough things. I don't drive a Mercedes, but I have a Honda that has never let me down. I don't have the latest iMac, or iPod or iPhone, but the iMac, iPod and iPhone I do have has been mine for years and still does everything I need to do, online and in the home. I have a lot of nice things, nice guitars, favorite books and big TVs. I have my dad's tools. Our house isn't a palace, but we're not palatial people. We're two-bedroom, brick, people, with attached garages and fireplaces. It's not great but it's good enough, for us. I'm thankful.

I sometimes feel like I swim upstream against technology. About the time I get comfortable with something, history shows it goes away. I was a master of RedRyder and White Knight, telecomm software for the Macintosh, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I knew my way around the XMODEM, YMODEM and ZMODEM file transfer protocols, and the whole "AT" command set for Hayes modems. All of that came and went in the span of about a dozen years.

But I'm thankful I work in a field where every day is subtly different. I'm not working on the same things in the same way I did a decade ago. I'm always mindful that three months from now, six months from now, things are going to be different. And even though this is often scary to me, I'm thankful just the same.

Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day. From the end of World War One, the only war with enough conceit to bill itself as The Great War. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We were at war. Tick, tick, tick, we were at peace. The first of the autumnal holidays, celebrated from sea to shining sea with savings on washing machines and wide screen HDTVs. But not at my house.

At my house, the two military holidays, Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, have always been a little more reverential than knocking fifty bucks off the price of a stereo. My mother and father were both Marines. My dad went to war for this country three times. At various times, he was responsible for recruiting, for training and for supplying the Marine Corps. I think about that often. If I screw up a Web page, and don't properly close a <table>, nothing really serious happens. Most browsers today will (correctly) assume that it should have closed after the last was closed. It isn't a big deal. I don't hear from my boss either way. I don't get spanked for not closing the table and I don't get a parade when I do. But my dad went to work every day at the kind of job, like being an airline pilot or a doctor, where everything matters.

If you pick some kid off of the street and fill him full of ideas and sign him up for a job where he loses a foot and can't sleep nights, you are in some way responsible.

If it is your job to teach this kid, in only twelve weeks, how not to lose a foot, and he does it anyway, then you in some way are responsible.

It may come about because you were distracted, tired, or because you were more interested in becoming his friend than in training him. And if your unit needs bullets, batteries or bandages and none are available, you have let them down, too, possibly with disastrous results. You cannot turn this kind of thinking off at the end of the day, can you? Or just walk away from it after twenty years? Maybe that is why Marines may stop getting paid, but they never, ever, stop being Marines.

Thanks to my dad's service, I can now save thirty, forty and even fifty percent on home furnishings this week. Not a bad deal, huh? At least I got my dad back. A whole lot of Marine families were not so lucky.

There are more than fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and fifty names on The Wall, the VietNam Veteran's Memorial, in Washington, DC. That's just for one war. The oldest was sixty-three (and you thought mowing the lawn was hard work at your age—try going to war in your sixties). The youngest was only fifteen. When I was fifteen, "courage" meant trying to touch a boob. A Marine named Bullock was only fifteen when he lost his life in service to his country. There are similar stories representing similar sacrifice in every war and in every military engagement that this country has ever been involved in.

Dads and brothers and friends and sweet hearts don't come home. Ball games go unvisited, lakes and streams go unfished. Kids learn to ride bikes and how to shave from other people. Someone else meets them as they graduate or get married and says "I am proud of you." Old cars go unrestored. Back porches go unpainted. Gardens go unplanted. But those kinds of things go unreported in the news, which focuses on simple, innocent, generic numbers. Three were killed, yesterday. Two, today.

It's okay to enjoy the last of the nice weather. It's okay to take the family out to dinner, this weekend. It's even okay to save money on a new iPod, this week. Just pause for a moment and remember the men and women who bought and paid for this day off with their service, and their lives. And remember all of those empty chairs, at dining rooms and recital halls and schools and churches. The men and women who should be sitting there aren't buying tires this week at any price. The least we can do is to remember them, once a year.

It's Like a Drug

There is magic in being able to transfer an emotion or a feeling from one person to another.

You're toddling along, thinking about the Big Report due on Thursday, and then you hear That Song. Instantly, you are at the Eighth and Ninth Grade Dance, trying to screw up the courage to ask Doreen to dance this next fast song, because that would mean you'll both be hot and tired (and already on the dance floor) when the band, whose set list you have figured out, will be following this one with a slow song. And you really, really want to slow dance with Doreen. You haven't visited that memory in years but it's recalled instantly with the opening bars of a piece of music from years ago. Close your eyes and you can smell Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific.

You're walking along, feeling kind of grumbly, because the boss didn't like your report. Suddenly a new Smart Car cruises up to the crosswalk and you cannot help but return it's smile. The way the headlights and fenders and grill are all designed, it is a car that just always looks happy. Many current Mazdas are the same. You just can't help but smile, seeing one.

You open up the pages of a newspaper, and there among the doom and despair and tragedy are the comics. Oh, that Dilbert, and his pointy-haired boss. How about that dog, that cat, those kids, huh? Then you read Doonesbury and discover that B.D., an entirely fictional character you have never actually met and never will, who joined the National Guard and was shipped off to war in Iraq, has lost a leg in that war. He's being stretchered back to the hospital by buddies from his unit, who encourage him, saying "Not your time, bro!" and "Not today!" And you shed a tiny little tear for a man that lives only in another man's imagination, but who has been a part of your life for twenty-five or thirty years.

I grew up learning to read with Sally, Dick and Jane. I "met" them in first grade, they helped me a lot and then we went on vacation. When we came back in the fall for second grade, everyone was a little taller, a little more developed, including Sally, Dick and Jane. When we were told at the end of second grade that we would not use that series of textbooks next year, I cried for the loss of my friends.

You click on a Web site link and are whisked away to that site, and before you even read anything posted there, you already feel the juices flowing. You are alive with the possibilities of the things you are about to read and see. Just responding to the colors and shapes.

The very best of this seems to come when describing a sense without being able to actually use it. Think of a music review, or a food, wine or cigar review. How do you explain to someone, in words, how a guitar sounds? You have to lean hard on words most people don't see every day. It's resonant. It's got a deep, rich middle with very bright highs. The wine has a finish of chocolate. The cigar has a flavor of leather and spices.

There's a little neuron deep in your brain that knows what happy is and one right next to it that knows what sad is and one nearby that understands how gramma's cooking tasted. And at any given moment, a sight, a sound, a smell can tickle one of those guys in very powerful ways. When Miranda Lambert sings "under that live oak, my favorite dog is buried in the yard" it conjures up hours of stories for anyone whose ever loved a dog and lost it.

I have always been fascinated by this. Good music, good art, good design is in many ways like a drug. You are pointed in one direction, you encounter this new input and it deflects you in some way. You're happier or sadder, more confident and inspired or hungrier. Someone has hand carried a feeling, an emotion, from across time and space and plugged it into your brain. You may tap your feet, or chuckle or whatever but the point is that it affects you in some way.

People who can do that consistently are richly rewarded in our culture. Singers, songwriters, chefs, actors and Jony Ive, CBE. I wish I could do it, too. I wish I was good at it.