love – Our technological infirmity

Disappointed by Mediocrity

Tasty Homemade Ham Sandwich, Duke’s Mayo, Cherokee Purple Tomato, Sourdough Bread

My mother had few rules more important than be the best that you can be at whatever you choose to be. She had grown up with little education beyond the one room school house she walked to as a child, but she never let that hold her back. She learned how to drive and and left the fields of Yadkin County for the big city of Mount Airy, North Carolina where she owned a very successful beauty shop for a couple of decades. She also became the matriarch of her extended family. She was determined that her sister’s six children would have the opportunity for successful lives. Two of them followed her and became beauticians. They all leaned on her and came to think of the house where she lived in Mount Airy as a gateway to another world. In time as she aged, she would lean on them which is how families should work.
Mother was also a great cook and gardener. She made it clear from as early as I have memories that I was going to college. She expected no less and I felt bound by her wishes until I graduated from Harvard in the summer of 1971.
Mother lived to be ninety-three and six months. She has been gone for twenty-two years. She loved life, travel, gardening, and working. The other side of mother was someone who long remembered anyone she believed had wronged her or not delivered on their part of an agreement. She never believed that fancy had to part of our lives but that did not preclude things being special. Even in her seventies she would quickly choose to work three days putting together a family celebration rather that hiring someone to cater it. Part of that was her belief that she could do a better job than most caterers. Most family members would agree that she was right.
The world has changed a lot in the two decades since mother died and I have gotten a lot older. At one time matriarchs like my mother and her sisters could hold their families close together. It is much harder today. Families no longer work the land where they were born, they live where they can find jobs often in a different state. People have a harder time getting together because of distance and the divisive politics that now ravages our nation. We can no longer even agree on what the facts are. Even today’s newscasters are jokes compared to the giants of the past. Our economy is now filled with franchises where the locations are run by poorly trained teenagers working for minimum and caring even less. The soul seems to be gone from the economy. Now it is just about making money. When I joined Apple for a nearly twenty-year run, we were out to change the world with products that everyone still remembers. In the over two decades since I left Apple, my only enduring memory of the company is Tim Cook on bended knee with a gift for our morally challenged president.
Now the business model is come up with a good idea, hook people on it, and figure out how to make as much money as possible while making the product cheaper and sustaining it with often borderline deceptive marketing. The formula for government is worse. The party in power has spent the last thirty years convincing people that government is bad even though people really do want things like good roads, education, social security and medical care.
With evangelical Christians giving religion a bad name, Congress barely holding a 12% approval rating while clearly in the pockets of special interests, and families more challenged at staying close together than ever, things do not look great for our society.

I believe the only hope for society is to demand more from each individual. We should expect everyone to be proud of their accomplishments and the work they do while understanding the impact their efforts and words have on the lives of others.

Instead of the salesman who sold us our $40K plus new car telling us to contact the parts department to get the forgotten owners manual, go find one and drive it to us. I would have done that when I was selling computers in the eighties. I would not have thought twice about it. It is how I would have expected to be treated myself. My customers deserved no less.
If someone makes me a mediocre sub or sandwich that costs $10, I am going to let them know about it. On the flip side if someone does a great job and fixes me a memorable meal for a reasonalbe price at a restaurant, I am going to give them some praise including a positive Google review.
As much as I want to be surprised by the extra individual effort that can make difference from Congress to a sandwich shop, I am moving forward with the knowledge that I hold our Constitution in higher regard and understand more about its creation and protection than most representatives. I plan to keep explaining that to them until my digital ink runs out.

I can also make a better sandwich than any teenager in a sub shop. As the cost of eating rises, I expect to eat out less. There are already too many bungled orders to expect things to turn around soon. There are few things worse than spending hard-earned money for something that disappoints.

I will also continue to highlight those services that continue to deliver great value and are proud of the work that they do.

My Mother, Grand Lady of Pine Street

My mother was born in August of 1910. Had she not smoked for a few decades, she might have made it to one hundred, but it would be selfish to wish her here. When she died in March of 2004, she was ready to go. Her body had given out and even her most recent friends had passed. She was content with her life but still loved her family especially her grandchildren. She loved them with all her heart even if sometimes her words did not express it as well as she would have liked.
In her nineties, she was not happy that her body could not do the things that she wanted it to do so I am pleased that she left while her mind was still sharp and before she became too uncomfortable.
I remember lots of things about my mom including many warm beach evenings with her on the North Carolina coast. If you have followed my posts over the years, you might have read our chicken frying adventure which was inspired by her.
When I originally wrote most of this post on August 22, 2005, I enjoyed some cold fried chicken which to me is the comfort food from my childhood. Thirteen years later, I ate some fried chicken which of course was nowhere as good as mother’s chicken. Still, the chicken brought back some memories. I think the summer of 1962, when I was in a special summer school, over half of my lunches contained fried chicken. Mother could fry a chicken blindfolded.

This picture is my mother cooking fried chicken for my birthday in March 2003. She died about a year later. That was the last chicken she fried. She was 92 and six months. She started cooking for her family when she was nine years old. Her mother had died. Mother used to tell us that she was so small and the cast iron pans were so large and heavy that her older brother had to put the pans on the wood stove.
Mother left home in the twenties when few women strayed far from home. She learned to drive a car while her sisters weren’t interested. Eventually she started her own beauty shop. For years her shop was on Main Street in Mount Airy, NC. Eventually, she had a very successful one in Lewisville, NC in the fifties until she retired and moved back to Mount Airy in the sixties. She lived there in the family house at 347 Pine Street until July 2000 when she moved to Roanoke.
It was a remarkable journey for a country girl who never had the chance to get a lot of formal education. She was a true matriarch who was willing to do anything for her family. I still remember my oldest cousin telling me the story of my mother deciding that he was going to military school. He didn’t want to go, but she would not take no for an answer. To this day, he believes that year in military school kept him from heading down a deadly path.
I learned a lot from my mother. She taught me to never be afraid of hard work and to be proud of my roots. Mother’s family was the source of her strength. She leaned on them and they leaned on her. One my cousins who grew up in a wonderful large family, tells the story that without my mother, they would have had no Christmas when growing up. Mother would drive home from Mount Airy to Yadkin County often getting stuck along the way. That was no problem for mom, she would just find a farmer to pull her car out. She never forgot to bring a car full of presents and clothing for her family.
The most important thing that I learned from mother was to live in the moment with an eye to the future. Mother never dwelled on the past. Mistakes were learning experiences. Mom also kept score so if you crossed her, she probably wouldn’t let you forget it. She also was never afraid of saying whatever crossed her mind which sometimes caused a few hurt feelings.
Mother was also a great gardener, a fantastic cook, and a loyal friend to many. Her one rule was to do whatever you were doing to the best of your ability. At the end that’s a pretty good way to live.
The one final thing that I learned from mom, is that material possessions really aren’t very important. The more you have, the more worries that you have. We’ve learned that lesson well, we have spent many years getting rid of things which we have accumulated over the years.
There still aren’t many days that something doesn’t remind us of my mother who was such an important part of our lives. She was never afraid to gamble on us and was always there for us when we needed her. She learned to navigate to Boston’s Logan Airport and fly to Canada at an age when many were afraid to leave home.
There’s probably no more relaxing feeling than coming home as a young adult and having your cares disappear into the walls of your family home as your mother’s home cooking completely finishes off your worries. Mother was an expert at creating that environment which could make your cares disappear in minutes though she apparently decided she would never make a homemade biscuit after she left home as a teenager. She did pop a few cans of refrigerated biscuits but my favorite were her rolls that melted in your mouth.
If we can provide that same spiritually nourishing environment for our kids, I think my mother might be proud of us even if we are amateurs at frying chicken.

A Measure of life we all should take

When my first grade career started under the watchful eye of my mother’s first cousin, Ms. Conrad, I was only thinking about what it would take to make it to the end of day. Then I could walk home, play a little football with friends, watch the evening news with my mother, and do my homework with some help from Whiskers, my cat. There was no thought of where the next seventy plus years would take me.
It is a lot easier to look back on seven decades than to imagine the future when you are six years old in a rapidly changing world. Now it makes sense for me to look back. I retired about a year ago when our company went out business. Our business dried up with changes in government funding. Since then I came back and worked one stray project but there haven’t been any others in eleven months. We weren’t building buggy harnesses, we were analyzing needs and designing fiber networks.
My first thought is that I am happy to have worked for the last fifty-six years in a number of productive roles. I consider myself even more fortunate to have worked from home the last fifteen years. I worked hard, maybe too hard during large parts of my life, but I do remain proud of what I have done.
Still it is important to acknowledge that your work career is not your life. How you measure your life probably says a lot more about the person you have become than almost any summary you could write.

My overall measure of life is to look and see if the places, people and organizations that I have touched are any better off for my having been there.

Digging deeper, I look at the kind of people that our children have become. Then, I look at the kind of life we have lived. Did we help others when possible, were we kind and respectful people, did we strive to give more in relationships than we took? I also look at what we learned from life, how much we enjoyed the things we have done, what kind of relationships did we build including those with our spouse, parents, children, grandparents, and friends. I don’t seek to measure anything precisely or to see how close to perfection we got, I just want to understand if our good intentions came through. To have more friends than we started with in first grade isn’t a bad accomplishment especially if you have managed to keep one of those first grade friendships going.
It is not important to me that every person I have met likes me because I have run into some not so nice people along the way. If they tried to harm me or those working for me, I hope they remember that I always stood up for what was right even if it made some people unhappy or came with a personal cost. There are also some people with extraordinarily thin skin who expect to be treated like the privileged person that they have adopted for their persona. You can never do enough for these folks because they will always be slighted by something you said or did which would not bother a normal person. I happy to let these folks stew in their own juices on the sidelines of my life. Whether they ended up liking me or hating me is irrelevant. That handful of people like that intersected my life for varying periods of time is hardly matters because they were just passing through.
Finally in measuring our lives, we have to look at the times we have lived through. I lived in Canada for sixteen years and over sixty years in the United States. I can remember things that touched me throughout life, the polio epidemic, President Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s election, the Watergate hearings, Vietnam demonstrations, moving to Canada, the energy crisis of the seventies, 20% interest rates in the early eighties, the Quebec separation crisis, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama’s election, COVID and Biden’s four years in office. I have lots of other memories especially of farming in Canada, my twenty years with Apple, and the fifteen years living on the North Carolina coast. For over fifty years the challenges thrown our way have been ones where we could adjust our lives and get on with it. Only recently has that changed.
Governments have come and gone, we have lived our lives. Then Trump and the MAGA movement showed up. The first four years were bad but largely erased by the peace and sanity of the Biden years. Now Trump is back and the threat to our country and the life we have lived is immeasurable. We wake every day wondering what the idiot in the White House has done overnight. If we were ten or fifteen years younger, we would move back to Canada. I don’t want the final chapters of my life written from within the confines of Trump’s world of hate and violence. I fight Trump world with the written word and my voice. The hope we nourish is that we can finally have justice in the White House. We must demonstrate to the world that no man is above the law in America.