One fine spring day years gone by, I was working my way through a new postal route in Vancouver. The area was near Oakridge Mall. It was a mix of businesses, houses, apartments and condos. At one red-brick apartment complex that boasted a well maintained pool flanked on two sides by townhouses, I was approached by a handsome man in the dingy hallway on the middle floor of the main complex. He was casually dressed in a way that hinted at someone who was used to wearing expensive suits.
He asked me if he could get me anything. Anything at all. His expression was that of total serenity, confidence, innocence and goodwill. His eyes were those of a jaguar just before it pounces on a rabbit. He looked like Joaquin Phoenix's character in the movie, The Immigrant. I instantly knew that he did not jest and could provide me with anything I might name. I politely declined. He regarded me for an instant that for me was like being scanned with ground penetrating radar.
“Water?” he asked.
I showed him the twin 1.5 litre glass water bottles I carried in my mail pouches.
“A snack?” he probed.
I showed him my sandwiches and apples in their mesh bag clipped to the back of my shoulder harness.
“Some candy then?”
At that point, I felt it would be rude to decline and he produced a caramel from his casual sport coat pocket.
While I chewed the treat, he introduced himself and informed me that he had recently moved from the floor we were standing on to one of the ground floor townhouses. Then he asked me if I would mind very much to deliver all his mail to the new address, although he hadn't applied for change of address service from the Post Office due to the prohibitive $40.00 cost. I swallowed my sweet mouthful and told him I would be happy to oblige. I had only a short time before reaching my retirement and I reasoned that if I kept such favours down to a minimum of this once, nothing could possibly go wrong.
Life and work progressed as usual and on many days I encountered the man by the pool or in the hallway. I saw him on a few occasions dressed very smartly and hurrying off to some errand. Each time we passed, he gave me a small candy. Over time, those treats devolved into unwrapped, dried up, old chocolates from unwanted Christmas boxes. I pocketed them and fed them to seagulls down the road.
His mail was scrutinizing in particular in order for me to re-direct it and I became interested in some of the things I saw. There was lots of communication from OPEC, for instance. Also, one piece of junk mail bore an invitation to an auction of ancient art from China and Japan, where the bidding started in the multiple millions! The next time he handed me a stale chocolate, I felt like Schrodinger’s cat.
Eventually quenching my piqued curiosity, Google told me that he had once been an important OPEC employee and was a remarkable individual who spoke multiple languages fluently and held many Degrees, several PhD s and had earned sundry other scholarly and business distinctions. He was then working as a professor at an institute of learning in Vancouver.
His wife turned out to be no less interesting. She was from an old noble family and one of her relatives was the official portrait painter for the royal family of her country of origin. I felt a deep respect for the man, out of admiration of his intellect. Contrarily, I felt a deep disgust at being plied with stale chocolates by such a person. Other denizens of nearby buildings called my attention away from the man for a time.
One old fellow was an Englishman who had been in the Royal Navy during WW II. He had no short-term memory, but each morning he met me in the lobby and greeted me. He had somehow decided that I was a German sailor due to the naval style sweater and toque I always wore. Each morning he would salute me, recite his naval ID tag number and then recount the Battle of the Norwegian Sea, in which he had served as a gunner on a destroyer.
I was current on naval history after spending many years playing submarine sims from that period of history and much reading. I had a working knowledge of the battle, the ships involved and their capabilities. I learned a lot from the old salt and he got a big kick out of teaching me. After the first morning, we interacted as sailors.
At another building, I met another Englishman. I'll call him Mr. T. He was also an ex-British Navy man and could have breathed on a scone and turned it into a rum cake. He was a delightful conversationalist. This building had two long walls of grouped mailboxes and it was at least a thirty minute mail-stop, so Mr. T had lots of time to tell his stories while I sorted the forty pounds of mail into tiny, outdated, sharp metal compartments.
One Summer day we arrived conversationally at the topic of the World Cup of soccer. At some point I told him that of all the English speaking commentators that I had ever heard, my favourite was Graham Leggat. Mr. T slapped his thigh and proceeded to tell me that he was the man who had interviewed and had hired Mr. Leggat. As it turned out, Mr. T happened to be at loose ends in Toronto once upon a time and had been pulled off the sidewalk to call soccer games by a CBC executive, due to Mr. T's understanding of the game and British accent. I put my mail pouches down and bowed my respect, right there in the lobby.
Around that time there were many changes at my household. My children were becoming adults and trying to make sense of a world they found opposed to what they had been taught at school. The Post Office was undergoing what the Corporation termed “Postal Transformation.” It was a stress sandwich served on a rusty hub-cap and eaten in the middle of a six lane freeway at rush hour. I strove to keep a steady rudder.
One day I was delivering a registered item that happened to be a new passport for a very nice old woman. Entering the elevator, I palmed my PDA (personal digital assistant) device. A clunky, wireless handheld scanner for tracking deliveries of bar-coded mail. It had unreliable batteries, outdated software, faulty firmware, a counter-intuitive interface and it hung like a benign tumour on my chest strap. As I began to punch in the required sequence to make my scan, I had to move a thumb out of the way of the bar code. The envelope slipped from my grasp as I did so.
With the slow motion of a car wreck, I saw the large, heavy card-board rectangle flip from top to bottom, execute a 90 degree attitude shift, pitch forward and plummet like a shot goose into a crack exactly two microns larger than the envelope's thickness. An hour of retrieval attempts at the base of the elevator yielded me nothing, so I tromped upstairs to tell the poor woman what had happened. It took an elevator technician two days to retrieve that document.
I had another incident precipitated by use of that damnable PDA. That resulted in a three day suspension which marred a near perfect work record of thirty years. In of itself, the transgression would not have been possible with the old technology of paper and pen. It was an attempt to do a favour for one of my customers at Christmastime.
The whole fiasco left me thoroughly rattled and at my soonest subsequent opportunity, I contacted the OPEC man and informed him that I would no longer be forwarding his mail without a properly signed and paid for authorization from him. I told him exactly why I was making this adjustment of our previous arrangement. I wanted no further glitches prior to retirement, much less, glitches arising out of doing favours. He nodded as if he completely understood.
Over the next few weeks, after a grace period that I had allowed for his purchase of change of address service, there was none forthcoming. I began to return his mail to sender and for many weeks I didn't see him. When Spring came, I began to see him loitering near the pool. When I passed by he muttered personal slights and whispered accusations. This grew heavily irksome over a very short time.
One day, as I came along the swimming pool path, he began muttering to another resident about me. I stopped, turned around and walked back to face him. His teenage son was also outside and after greeting those three individuals, I looked at the Whispering Man and told him that it seemed he wished to gain my attention. I assured him that he now had it in full and asked him to please state the case for his displeasure.
He looked startled, recovered, and told me a tale of a tax document that he assumed I had lost or misplaced. He did this with the insinuation that it may have been on purpose. The further news was that this missing document had cost him a $400.00 penalty.
I asked him if he had paid for a change of address service. He said he chose to contact all his correspondents and manually provide the new address, as the service wasn't worth the price, in his estimation. I asked if the alleged lost document had been addressed to his new address. He replied that it had indeed.
I lit a smoke and after a draw or two, I told him that I would thoroughly investigate the matter and if I found out that I had anything whatsoever to do with the misplacement of the item, I would happily pay him the $400.00 in cash from my own shallow pockets. His son remarked how reasonable a deal that was and his father sent the boy indoors with a withering gaze.
The excluded neighbour walked away to his own errands and I once again explained my position to the Whispering Man. He became adamant that I had been wrongly delivering some of his newly addressed mail to a nearby church which shared the same numerical address as his own. I told him I would also investigate that avenue.
I went straightaway to the church and left a note through the mail slot with my query for the person who handled the church's mail. I received a scrawled note a week later that there were no misdelivered items in their correspondence and that only the Pastor handled the mail. I passed that information onto the Whispering Man. He was not convinced and reverted to sibilant character assassination tactics with serpentine glee.
After much work done on my own time, I managed to get a personal letter from the Pastor on church letterhead stating that for as long back as she had been preaching at that church, there had been no wrong deliveries and that the church’s policy was to place any misdelivered mail into a red mail box each evening, if such event ever occurred. I added my own personal note that stated that I hoped the assurance from the Pastor would set his mind to rest on the matter for good. That time it worked.
While I contend that the Darwin and Wedgwood families were quite an eccentric bunch, by my standards, I agree with Ste
phen Jay Gould that there is enough meat to Charles' Theory Of Evolution to keep us all arguing well beyond my lifetime. I also learned from Mr. Gould that the human brain doesn't reach its full physical size until 3-6 months after birth. Chimps, however, are born with brains fully formed. I also learned about the Irish Elk, an extinct species that used to sport twelve foot racks of antlers. That got me cogitating.
Some people have argued that as the elk got larger, their antlers got bigger. Some say the opposite and others say that the unwieldy antlers were the animals undoing. The can of worms that this opens up is whether or not a species will evolve a certain trait and then not be able to turn off the continuation of the trait even if it dooms the organism.
Some contend that the antlers were for the purpose of attracting females and that the body size followed naturally. Others counter, that as the body got larger, the antlers had to also enlarge. One of the Huxley brothers proved that the relative sizes of the antlers and bodies in any species of deer, grow at a certain proportion and that antler growth is always accelerated proportionately and thus their immense size could even be predicted.
When I applied some of those strands of thought to the human adaptations we see in ourselves, compared to our closely related primates, I wonder if our artificial human environment will act to select our very large brains for our continuation or for our eventual annihilation. One of my favourite historians, Mr. Hendrik Willem van Loon, has pointed out that all the great walls of history were built to keep out foreigners and all of them eventually failed. I concur with that observation and when I hear of a future wall along the Rio Grande, I imagine a future tourist attraction with guides speaking neither English nor Spanish.
Back to the brain of the human infant, let me make an analogy of a massive quantum computer. As we are born and begin receiving our first concrete sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells; the technicians are still installing more pristine RAM. I contend, that in this analogy we are creating programs and storage areas for different kinds of data. In each individual the collections and configurations share many of the same inputs but each person’s mental file or personal memory is absolutely unique from any other. Which brings me, naturally to The Fog.
I was driving down the Fraser Canyon the other morning and just outside of Lillooet, I entered a landscape reminiscent of a Chinese ink wash painting of great beauty and equivalent danger. The cloud ceiling was lower than the road and the visibility was about twenty feet, although a bright sun was shining above in a turquoise sky. I proceeded with great caution on my way to attend a Memorial Service for my step-father and I did not want to necessitate another such gathering on my own behalf.
As I went, pieces of rocks, pine trees and snatches of riverscape would intrude upon the mostly blank canvas of white. I thought of the Vikings, some of whom were my ancestors and I recalled that fog was the only thing they were reputed to truly fear. Easily understandable for a mariner well steeped in legends, lore and ancient teachings. What I mean is, that our individual internal worlds are comprised of only those bits of reality that we know to compare any new data with, and additionally, that which we can imagine. This is where the fear enters in.
The child of a rich man might venture into the outside world completely unprepared to assimilate the new horrors at hand, things until then unimaginable to that child. A child from the dirty streets of poverty might enter the rich child's palatial house of refinement and luxury and be unable to comprehend the beauty.
Our example becomes very different if both children had been told stories or had been read books describing heretofore hidden worlds. The brain maps of such children would have had, at the very least, some containers set aside for new things. Those concepts and realities would in turn, have give them the ability to process new input and draw their own conclusions with the appropriate emotional responses common to our species.
In fog, there is an advantage in having to only deal with one thing at a time. As long as it is familiar, it poses no great risk. The corresponding disadvantage is that the visual blank will be able to draw upon the entire repertoire already programmed into the brain of the observer, be it real, philosophical or imaginary. Nature abhors a vacuum and it is certain that the individual will begin to fill in the blanks. This could prove terrifying.
Now, on a sunny day we have the advantage of being able to take in the big picture scenario of any panorama. The corresponding disadvantage to this is that we can only perceive that which we have allowed brain space for prior to what it is we are observing. Another way to put it is that we can only see as far as we have stretched our minds. This causes us to miss very much. In the above two paragraphs we can see a comforting balance at work whether or not we understand it.
Back at the apartment complex of the Whispering Man, I used to talk to another old man who had come from a Communist country to Canada and was old enough to have seen the transition of the system in his country before he escaped. He warned me that he could see very many of the same things occurring to an oblivious Canadian and American public. I met several other elders from a variety of countries who made that same observation because their perceptions had been stretched to receive those repeating patterns.
Recently, I took a little nap and had a dream. In the dream I was in the parking lot of a shopping centre of the near future. My wife had gone into a store and I was waiting outside for her return. I saw a small kiosk not unlike a fast-food drive-through communication station. It had a flickering sign in three colours. Each colour had a message about a particular social activity. The tone of the text as it scrolled across the flat screen was just this side of authoritative. There was a green message about planting trees. There was a yellow message about collecting donations for future refugees of future wars. Finally there was a red message about donating blood to the blood bank.
I walked over and watched the three messages roll by and then listened to an audio blurb of each one that used every buzz word and catch-phrase in the politically correct lexicon of my dream time. At the end of the rather short presentation was an order to press one’s car key fob to generate a match with one of the three activities. Just for shits and giggles, I decided to try it. Mine came up red and this caused a further audio dialogue to begin on that subject. As I listened, a small electric car rounded the corner and came abreast of me.
A lady with sunglasses and a polyester uniform rolled down her window, looked at me hard and told me in a husky voice that it was great that I had chosen to donate my blood. I began to point out to her that in truth I hadn't chosen anything and that I was already the veteran of 52 pints worth of blood donations. (a true fact of my waking life) I was about to ask her how many pints she had given when my cat intervened and woke me from my reverie.
On the way to the coffee pot, I thought about the hours millions of us have spent staring at the news-crawl along the bottom of our TV screens, the wrongly named “progress bars” on our computers and colour coded cubes that link to e-mail, Google +, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. This made me remember that all the banks have colours as do many large corporations. Orange, green, red and blue banks come immediately to the mind of any Canadian by their trademark names.
I pondered that by accident or by design, we are creating spaces in our brains for those little moving scripts, blurbs and colour codes. The Machiavellian magic of Madison Avenue and Hollywood hyperbole can and does attach emotional riders to those tiny daily inputs. We are walking tricky ground just now, in my opinion. While it may easily be argued that if one is too smart, one will never be happy and that ignorance is bliss. It may also easily be observed that in nature, if one acts like food, one becomes food.
Just as the Industrial Revolution served an insatiable beast within that we are still wrestling with to the impoverishment of many and the enrichment of a few, it must be remembered that we created the machines. It may well be that our larger brains are an adaptation/mutation that has ceased to serve us. Are we become like Irish Elks?
Intelligent people and imbeciles are both also human and thus share 99.9 of the same genes. There is more genetic diversity within a single ethnic group than there is between different ethnic groups. It's all rather confusing and again we perceive The Fog. There is an easily accessible internal helper I will tell you of, usually found cloaked in faux Native American mysticism. This really matters not as it can be traced with variations, to many cultures in many different eras with many variations. It helps both on clear days and on foggy days.
The gist of the teaching is that no matter where you are or what you are doing, the four direction of North, South, East and West remain. One may add the Centre, Above and Below if they progress from two dimensional thought into three. I will deal with only the four directions. If we give attributes to these directions we may use those patterns for pondering situations we come across. The way I first heard it was that the attribute of the North was Wisdom, South stood for Innocence, West for Introspection and East for Illumination.
Now, if you are in a quandary, you can physically turn yourself to these four cardinal points and take a moment to register what thoughts come to you. I warrant that without much practice at all, you will easily see that very different qualities and species of thoughts come from those different directions.
Walk away and let your wondrous computer of a brain run down all the code and without any conniving on your part, you will arrive at your own unique blending of all these bodies of thought on the one given subject. This is a wonderful helper and is very therapeutic as it allows the brain to do what it is yearning to do, which is problem solving.
After many a year, this will become internalized and automatic. For myself, when I clear away the filigree and boil it all down, I could say it as follows: Do what you know. Do what you want. Consider doing new things. Reflect upon things that you have done. You can surely figure out the North and the South of those four examples. They are merely the active expressions of the aforementioned teaching.
I will share with you a quote from Blazing Saddles that apparently was a favourite of the Whispering Man, according to a close friend of his, who wrote about it on his blog. When I saw it, I couldn't help but make a place in my heart for the Whispering Man and his family. In the movie, an imbecile is looking into a wooden box that his scheming boss and crew have just plundered in a stage coach robbery.
As the simple cowhand/robber gloats over the objects it contained, which objects he thinks to be precious, his boss leans over and growls, “Silver rings your butt! Them's washers!”
fin