Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world | Video on TED.com

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world | Video on TED.com

Group inaction in action

So here we are in 2011 bouncing along down the road.  Butts will be worn slightly more bruised this season.  America is starting to appear less like the place the olds used to speak of proudly, and more like countries the olds used to warn us about.  Something fundamental has changed.  So?  What is it? 

For one a certain segment of our population is under a kind of get poor slow attack the last few decades and it has worked to perfection.   Whilst another segment, a much-much smaller one is just giddy from the take all you can and pay nothing blitz rave they have been on, all the while enjoying a nice long mimosa scented tinkle down upon the rest of us.  Oh happy Fourth of July by the way. 

As a growing portion of us examine our economic conditions more closely than ever before, it is important to remember that even a struggling lower middle class lives much better in the US than in most other countries.   A comforting thought to be sure, but hungry is hungry even in Hungary.   Greed or something like that has pushed our leaders towards bowing down to the super rich at the peril of so many others.  Egypt and Syria showed the world you can only push people, so far.   While there is no equating the level of corruption, violence, cronyism, and thievery, in the US to anything near what has been perfected by our Eastern brothers.   They do seem to be “sending in plays”.  As we act and overreact to their troubles diverting desperately needed attention from our own. 

One small miscalculation being made by our leaders, is that here in America you will not find a more medicated, caffeinated over armed group of citizenry on this entire planet.  While I’ am a devote coward, it is much in the same way Shaggy & Scoobie are.   Afraid, but we act, because we must.  I do not condone violence of any kind as the solution for anything, to paraphrase, “violence is a blunt tool for carving out peaceful change.”

Nor I do not subscribe to the notion that all one need to do is open yourself to the universal love and you will find inner bliss, diet soda will be good for you, peace will bloom like a flower in the mid east and that stubborn last 5 pounds you have been running your ass off to lose will melt away then there will be key lime pie for dessert. 

It comes down to two lies were, are told.  One lie is that we as a country are broke.  Second is that the rich pay the lion’s share of the taxes both are untrue.

If we are broke?  How is it we have spent $ 758,956,404,867 and, change in Iraq and, we are still spending.  This is according to http://costofwar.com/en/.  

 Not to mention the thousands of dead American’s, that we so rarely seem to mention.   Second.  Well let’s put it this way.  How well has your 401k been performing over the last decade or two?  The single sector of growth in our economy are families earning 200k and over.  Every other sector has either fallen or remained flat.  This is according to http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/where-do-you-fall-on-the-income-curve/.  For the very top families wealth has more than doubled.   All this as our leaders from both sides display their mock indignation and scruples to the public and their privates to selected twitter followers.

Would you believe me if I told you that I think we can change this?

Lets wind the clock back 70 years.  People just like you and I put down there pencils and hammers walked away from there typewriters and coffee shop grills then willingly went far away to a place they were told someone was going to be shooting bullets at their heads.  They did this because they knew they (or were told) they needed to.  There is no discussion on whether the world has been a better place since.  They rightly have earned the moniker of “the greatest generation.”

Here now we are lucky enough not to have to go through all of that.  We still must act be act smartly and with out the need for bloodshed.  Yes we need to sacrifice but only a little bit.  The idea is a simple for one day every American voluntarily stays home from work.  If you are a 1^st responder, look inside yourself and make the choice.  In any case we consume as close to nothing as we can, on that day.  Understanding that every action taken every bit of power saved whether it is buying power or from our limited natural recourses will be felt, tabulated and analyzed by the huge corporations we all love so much.  And who in fact run to a large degree own our lives..

So you take one day off.  Spend our time reading or actually snuggling with loved ones.  Play games or sleep.    If you must watch TV or go on the net do so sparingly remembering the goal.   Be bored but be focused.   Focused on one goal.  Getting the top 1% in this country to pay their fair share.  Maybe even some back taxes.

We could do this people!

They are cutting funding to our schools and high-speed rail to keep tax breaks for the rich.  That is for the top 1%.  Hey!  The rest of us are 99%, so do the math they lose.  It is only by our inaction that this can remain the way it is.

Small business that is Americans buying stuff accounts for 70% of our economy.  If for one day there was reduced commerce in America our leaders would notice.  With out violence or mass street protests.  They would have little to hold over us to dampen the message.   The effect on the stock market alone of a one day American buying stoppage would be staggering.  It is true that some power brokers will try to take advantage of an action like this.   Any time you stand up for what you believe in it costs you something.  

 If history holds true than “first the will ignore you, then they will laugh at you, then they will fight you, then you win.” – Nicholas Klein.   Imagine Banks unable to stay open, gas stations unsuccessful in pedaling $5 gas.  If you took a date like 23, 2013 and no one bought or worked, consuming as little as they could for one day.

Just as in Egypt and other places the job will not be finished in one day.   The power of this protest is we can and will do it again.  The second time more people will join.  You know they will.  People are hurting angry and feel dismissed.  Hurting, angry dismissed people just love to join a crowd.  The third time even more will join.

It makes me wonder why it gets to the point where people have to shoot at one another to achieve change.  Is because people missed all the chances they had to get the same thing taking smaller actions because after all things are not so bad?  By the time it gets “so bad” will it be too late to take the smaller actions?

So I ask myself could I make such a sacrifice?   Am I willing to do nothing to achieve change?  For one day?  Two days?  Long enough to have eaten all the half bags of Doritto’s and cans of green beans in the back of my cupboards?  Could you?   Is it bad enough yet?

Diet soda will always be bad for us.  Many of us do not care for key lime pie.  But we can make our owners and leaders listen so they just can’t tell us how more tax breaks will get the idle 9.7% of us working again.  The real number of unemployed is closer to 15%.  The books are cooked to keep the numbers artificially low.  If you have stopped looking you are counted as employed. You just have more vacation time but you lose the dental.  This way we can effect change.  No war.  No people pouring into the street.  Our effect will be a hole, in the bottom line of our owners tally sheets.  A hole made by ordinary citizens like you and I taking action, by taking no action.  Eventually it will become less expensive for them to pay the tax than to keep seeing ever growing gaps in their income stream.  Just the threat of further uncertainty alone would have an effect.  The stock markets hate uncertainty. 

It is bad enough yet?

I return you now to your previously scheduled life already in progress, and I thank you for your time and careful attention.

Copyright © 2011 JV Wilder
All images from Google images

 

The Situation on Black Briar Road

The act of looking into the mirror is one of faith and discovery.  Everyone carries the inner image of them self.  When the reflection glances back upon you, your twin either confirms or ignores the imag held moments before.  It tells no white lies to spare your feelings.  We either listen to the truth it speaks or not.

That bit of knowledge alone would have been reason enough for Jeff H. Conner to avoid mirrors.  Like so many, answers his was easier than that,  the fact was he didn’t care.   On days he had to shave his face he did so in the shower by feel and memory.  Hot water, shaving cream and skill allowing him to de-shower predominantly clean-shaven and nick less.    He kept a stash of disposable razors in the car for the inevitable times his partner would comment on a missed section of cheek or chin.  The light to moderate pain of dry shaving that one square inch was enough slow him down and become temporarily zen regards to shaving in the shower.

  

Some long-term couples begin to resemble each other.  Some pet owners look like their pets.  Jeff  Conner a homicide detective looked like his job.  In fact he looked like he came straight from central casting.   Greying, balding and heavy.  Heavy in the way a dump truck was heavy rather than Jabba the Hut heavy.

The intelligent ones most always end up in homicide.  You need to be ready to learn so much more in homicide.  If you have a case involving a Jeweler you learn a little about that business.  One of the perks for Jeff of being in this line of work was the chance to learn outside this sphere of knowing.  Bookbinders, sports managers, insurance salesmen, even house wives had their tidbits to offer.  In one case where a housewife shot her cheating abusive husband 4 times in the chest, the subject spent a lot of interview time teaching him to cook and how to make his jacket not look as if had not been slept in, by hanging it in the bathroom on a good wooden hanger not wire, when he took this hot morning shower.  She had emphasized it being a quality wooden hanger.   No, wire hangers.  He had done just that many times since it always made him smile.  

The body had the shocked look of the arrogant not the terrified look of the innocent on it’s frozen face.  Landing flat on his back on the oak parquet living room floor.  Jeff stepped around.  As photos were taken and  prints rolled.  The wife had run upstairs and locked herself into the bathroom.  She had dropped the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver where she stood when she fired it.  The on scene personal all force veterans saw the situation for what it was.  They had seen it before.  The location was ‘secure’ so the decision was made to wait her out.  So much more paperwork involved when you go in with smoke and grenades.

Every police officer and wider all first responders had parent issues.  Good, bad or, otherwise they all had them.   Some as simple as ‘I was gonna be a 4^th generation cop before I was born.’  Like Jeff's younger partner Richard ‘Big Dick’ Haggerty had told Jeff more than twice over after shift refreshments.  For some a darker action witnessed had lead them here.  To this, place.  A place where, they could to try and make a small difference make any difference.   To find some bit of justice for the victims.  It astonished Jeff how he had to dig deep sometimes to unearth the real victims among the self-purported variety.  This had become something of a national sport of late even more so in Hollywood, and you did not have to be famous to play.   Casey Anthony was neither the first nor the last killer to walk free under the victim umbrella.  In deed there were many that thought the whole of the democratic system political and judicial was in the midst of falling apart.  Jeff preferred it was listening and changing to fit into an ever, shifting world.  Jeff was a good listener made him a good cop.  Over his career there were many times he didn’t have to do much more than listen and ask the right questions.  In more than a few cases he simply listened as they talked them self right into ‘C’ block.

Jeff was climbing the stairs of the modest house passing officers he knew well and some less well.   He hummed the theme from ‘COPS’ quietly as he ascended and looked at the family photos that lined the stairwell.  Just one, step from the second floor he saw a picture of the wife dark hair young happy full of life.  Next to her was one of the corpse downstairs.  “What you gonna do when she shoots at you.”  He sang finishing the song and tapping a finger on the picture frame of the husband.  “BOOM.”   He whispered to the dead photo.

Both the officer that stood beside the locked bathroom door and Detective Richard Haggarty looked up and smiled at this.   Cop humor.   Is part of the job.  It is not uncaring as each crime is felt to some extent.  Still if you wanted to make it home for, dinner fully intact you needed a way to disconnect from all the darkness and try to live mostly in the light. (So to speak.)

Jeff glanced at the name on the incident sheet. Richard commenting on Jeff’s acapella song said “You know Jeff had you survived you would be a very sick man right now.”   Jeff grinned and pointed at the closed door noticing the gap at the bottom was cut at least one inch too short light from the bathroom spilled onto the tan carpeted hallway.  Jeff sat on the floor with his back to the wall on the right side of the door not directly in front.  On the off chance she had another weapon with her.  He was pretty sure, she could hear him as he sat down with a small grunt.

‘Elaine, my name is Jeff Connor I’m a detective with the Los Angeles police department."  He waited.  He could hear her in there.  Crying?

"Elaine, I would like to talk to you about this situation we have here."

In most negations he liked to use the subject’s first name he found it highly effective.

Another, pause to reveal his listening. 

 "’Elaine if it would make you feel more comfortable you could unlock the door and let me in we could talk in there."

“I shot him.”  Elaine quivered.  

“I shot him.”  This time her voice so soft it only conveyed the information it herself

‘Well, Elaine we can talk about all of that why not unlock the door?"

When Richard heard her words I shot him,  he whispered over to the other officer “ Aw It’s ok daring you know I’m not even sure that is illegal anymore.”

The officer smiled stifled a larger laugh.  The grin felt like a reward for Richard.  All his life he had enjoyed making people laugh.  He had always thought what a fine thing to be able to create from nothing a laugh or even a smile. 

Jeff felt his butt start no complained about the hard floor.   He struggled to his feet noisily her benefit.

 "‘You have such a nice home here Elaine surly there must be a more comfortable place to talk."  Jeff continued.

Just keeping her engaged. There was the sound of the bathroom door lock being turned with a ‘click.’  Jeff knocked on the door.

"May I come in Elaine?"  He waited.

"OK" 

10 seconds later Jeff called though the door to have the ‘doc’ send up an icepack.   Jeff handed it to Elaine who touched it to the swollen black eye growing on her face.

"This will be the last time you will have to nurse a black eye."  Jeff said half smiling. 

Sixty-eight minutes later they both emerged.  Elaine in her blood stained dress holding the mostly melted ice pack to her eye.  At the foot of the stairs Jeff urged her left away from where the body still lay.  Walking her through the kitchen out the side door and around the back of the house to a waiting cruiser.  She didn’t fight as they put the cuffs on her.  Jeff stopped the office from putting her hands behind her and turned her cuffing her hands in front so she could hold a fresh ice pack to her face.  Another officer sitting next to her in the back seat incase she had second thoughts on the ride in.  She didn’t seem like the type but all the cops know you never fucking know.

As Jeff got into his brown crown Vic. another officer Alex Tavelman passed him."‘Nice touch in there Conner." he said not slowing down and thumping the roof of the car with one hand as he walked away. 

 Elaine Carol Taylor served 4 months of on a one-year sentence. 

She lives now with her husband and one year old son in Bend Oregon.  Upon her release and after parole she sold the family house and left Los Angeles.  

She has never been back.

Copyright © 2011 J. V. Wilder. All right reserved

21 minutes on I-95

They were driving too fast.  The sun had set an hour ago the sky still colored azure fading to charcoal.  Jupiter was high in the sky.   An electrical engineer and a patent holder she followed the stars: she loved them she could never remember a time when they both felt more alive ; when everything seemed so 'in it’s proper place'. The top was down she looked at her husband in the left seat.  Focused a slanted grin and looking damn good in his aviators.  He touched her thigh and accelerated. 

The kid was drunk double the legal limit.  He had just lit a smoke when his back window turned blue and red. ‘Fuck’ If I get a ticket my ol man will skin me alive.’

He tried to think ¼ mile to the highway and ½ mile to driveway. ‘Fuck it’  He gunned it.

Inside patrol car 41 Officer Mac Leary muttered ‘ Don’t run asshole.’

She turned back in the passenger seat and saw their sleeping daughter.  Legally she should have been in a booster but the small car had no back seat and they would soon have to trade in the love mobile.   No hurry she was still small and there was time for one more run.  She tucked the blanket under her sleeping girl’s chin  amazed the child could sleep through the roar and the wind pulling strands of hair almost straight up.   'Life was so perfect' she thought before thinking again 'count your blessing but don’t count on them'.

The big block police dodge was just slipping into its comfort zone as the needle stretched to 90.  The kid who was, way ahead, looked in the rear view.  'FAST’ he thought trying to coax a little more speed from the aging truck.  ‘Come on girl come on.’  He spoke lovingly listening to rusted muffler parts banging the under carriage.  He rolled the window down when a puff of air blew the ash from his smoke directly into his right eye.

They could not see on coming traffic as they ascended a gentle rise.  She leaned back and saw the first stars coming out.  Calling their names.   Head back wind blown she flew through outer space.  Just a few feet away her husband was in a different world.

The kid had his eyes closed for a good 20 seconds rubbing the right one when he looked up he saw just open road ahead but behind him flashing lights were filling more of the view.  Close enough to the exit he knew so well he switched the lights off laughing to himself.  The left front tire began to make a bad noise.

They were just feeling that weightlessness cresting the hill.  When people speak of ‘They never saw it coming.’  They never did.  The car came to pieces.  The child bounced once hard tossed into the air still snuggled in her blanket then skipping harder across a muddy patch of grass and upside down into a thick bush at the side of the road. She woke 30 minutes later alone in the dark held in place by some unseen force she was not pleased, and began to scream.

Officer Mac Leary saw the bright flash but he saw the impact first’ TC TC’  traffic collision   (They love acronyms for some reason) he yelled into the mike.  He knew even before he rolled on scene this was a fatal.  The smaller car was half a car and on fire.  The kid would live though his back and legs would remind him of this night for the rest of his life.  When he came too and for years after the full weight of 2 lives would show themselves, depression and guilt would hang on him.  He would however survive and thrive have 3 kids of his own and love them in a way few fathers can.  He lived every second as a gift because he knew just how fast things can change.

It was not until the fire was out that Officer Mac Leary heard something.  He lighted the area sweeping as he had been taught, shouting out for the others to ‘ quiet I hear something.’  Then they all heard the screams and quickly found the source.  She was alive ‘probably won’t remember a thing.’ one said as they cut the branches and stickers away ‘probably best for her’ he thought but did not say.  Her face was bloody from a deep cut on her scalp but they knew for the most part scalp wounds bleed like hell but are rarely fatal. 

In the ambulance they checked her eyes and pulse.  No sign of internal injuries.  She woke briefly tried to speak but fog over took her.  Hours later there was a sort of impromptu conference.  The admitting doctor wanted to know about the patient in 4.  She came in with the TC she is stable laceration to the back of her head bruises and cuts mild concussion but aside from that she is ok to go anytime.  Well where are her RA’s responsible adults  (more anagrams) the doctor asked.  The nurse did not frown but neither did she have her usual smile when she said they were both down stairs she pointed to room 4.  The doctor marked his sheet saying ‘I’ll call social.’

About the 3^rd thing out of the girls mouth was Mommy?  The nurse sat on her bed and took her small hand laying it all out for her with all the professionalism she could muster.   The girl cried but not a lot.  At her age a sense that life was a one and only thing that it was precious and delicate did not register in fact she half believed in the morning like cartoon parents they would be alive.  That and being tossed 50 yards and landing in a bush takes its price on even a young body.  It would take time to be real for her.

It took social services 2 days to arrive by which time no living relative had been found so she would be put in a home temporally (and all that it implies) she had become a staff favorite.  As detached as the staff preformed they looked in on her often and forward to doing so and even helping her though her tiny crying jags.  Everyone had been nice to her not like mommy or daddy but nice.  Everything will be ok they told her.  She thought about her mom and her dad she thought of flying though the darkness as she walked from the hospital.

Copyright © 2011 J. V. Wilder. All right reserved

Great Granny Tate

 

-->

The young girl and the sea.

Nothing was happening. Not even the near constant chirp of finches broke the silence to marked the passage of time.  Anna Tate, 32 days and 9 hours short of her fourteenth birthday, sat in an old dry wicker chair and felt the breeze that rocking through hot, still air made on her face.   On the glass table before her sat a lone, weary silver tray, its once handsome etchings long traded for memory. Clear droplets meandered down the outside of tall glasses perched on the tray. Moisture pulled and teased an August Georgia afternoon.  The cut-crystal ice bucket held a dozen loose cubes already loosing their fight to survive.

Anna loved this place in a way she did not fully understand.   As long as she could remember, summer meant being packed off to Nana Tate's house for at least part of the time. Her warmest, strongest memory's were born here, waiting for her return.   The past few summers, her parents simply dropped her off.   Straightaway, Anna felt better and more on her own. More self-reliant here, with all normal routines on hold.  Under her Nana's watchful eyes that never intruded or warned her they instead said; "Go ahead. Try. It is safe to try".  This year for the first time, Anna's parents were allowing her to take the six-hour train ride north back home by herself.   Her great-grandmother's house was something over 180 years old. Built by her great-grandfather's own hands when he was the age she is now.  Everything about it said home. The way it felt inside, it's creaks and sighs, the smell of the place.  It had that timeworn feeling that said I have been here a long time and suggesting that it might always be that way.
Once you get a place like that inside you, the world is a little less lonely.   And your place in it a little more securely anchored.

 To Anna, the world just seemed so much easier to understand rocking on a 140-year-old porch looking out over the trees that were standing there before the house was born.   She sipped her drink, condensation trickling over her fingers. The glass, like everything else here, was old. Vintage, impossibly thin.  The shadow of a gold rim the glass wore in its youth still showed in broken shadows, that refused to be lost in time.

Greta "Nana Tate" was nearing her one-hundred twelfth, well, one-hundredth-something birthday; She never did have a good fix on the exact date she arrived in her father's hands in the family's kitchen. For 100 something, she was still very alert. Slowed by age, true, but she seemed in harmony with the house. They fit each other.  Old doors that peevishly stuck for others opened at her knowing, measured touch. The floors, crafted by decades of footfalls, showed where she most often stood.  Anna would sit and listen to her great-grandmother's soft, steady voice tell tales about the family and of life long ago.

Of everyone in Anna's life, it was her "Nana Tate" that seemed to know her best. Maybe it was because she did everything so slowly, with such care and attention. She even listened slow. Maybe it was that Nana Tate saw something in her great-grand daughter's eyes that others missed. She knew just what it was. It was fear.  She knew someplace Anna had seen it, smelled, tasted it in her mouth, and whatever it was, it had left its mark on the child. A light mist over too young eyes. Nana Tate had seen it before. She knew fear came in so many different packages wrapped in failure and success but mostly dressed as the unknown.  Nana Tate suspected from her age, it was fear of onrushing adulthood, a time when you start to define yourself and let the world see you for what you are. It takes a kind of courage, like learning to walk.  It's scary and you fall down a lot.  In trade, your world becomes infinitely larger. Perhaps in time, when she was ready, she will tell someone what put fear in her eye, Nanna Tate thought. Then Nana Tate let that thought pass as well.

The pair sat, sipped lemonade, and chatted. Nana Tate talked about her own life as a child. How she had lived in a time when Americans lived in wooden homes with dirt floors and no running water, to a time when people were living up in outer space. Nana Tate pointed an arthritic didgit upwards.  A throwback to a time when if you talked about space to someone you almost needed to point up.   Anna noticed the way when Nana Tate spoke of the past.  The tone was not: what a burden it was, rather what a wonder it was and how far we have come. To Anna it felt like a burden fetching water to drink or chopping wood to be warm or cook. Instead, Nana Tate spoke of how thrilling it was for her watching father driving up the rutted dirt driveway in a Model T. The first automobile she had ever seen.

"The sound and smoke really upset the horses," she said. "Maybe they knew it was a bad idea," she added with a smile.
"The way daddy bounced around in that thing, he was holding onto it like the man on a flying trapeze." Nana Tate's southern accent so warm, thick and buttery. Her words had to swim through summer air to reach Anna's ears.

"I was 13 years old, 'bout your age," she started again, easing back into her wicker chair. Lowering herself until just inches above the seat before letting gravity gently land her. "My parents sent me to school all the way across the ocean in Europe to study for two whole years. Abroad, they called it." Her accent stretched the word out making it a long journey. "I had never spent more then one night ever away from home." Nana Tate paused, again. Her eyes looking off into some distance for a moment before coming ashore again to meet Anna's. "This was going to be for two years, to live with some cousins I didn't know I had, all just to go to school. I'd be all on my own."

Anna let that thought sink in. Felt the weight those words held for her. On my own.

"I was plenty afraid. I wanted my Father to at least take the trip with me."

Anna listened, thinking.

"Uh? Nana! Why not just refuse to go?"  Anna thought

Greta's voice brought her back from her question. Also answered it.

"Affording me this trip, this chance to learn, meant even my mother was forced to take in extra work. They both wanted this for me. I didn't fight them. I was afraid but." Nana Tate stopped shifting slowly in the chair, slowing her words, "you can't lay down to your fears."  She said looking at Anna.  "Can't let them push ya round."  Nana said.

When her great-grandmother talked to her like this, it was not like the commands of a parent, "Wash your face, make your bed." Nana Tate mostly shined her light back upon herself. This was the way she had lived each day.

In the yard around them, afternoon insects reveled in a Mardi Gras of the very small that marks being deep into summer in the deep South.

"Best to lean into fear and challenges." Nana Tate grinned, half bearing her teeth in mock battle.  Always that smile waiting just under the surface.

Anna was already wrapped up in the story. She thought of herself in that position, forced onto a ship and taken away. No cell phone, no iPod, no Nintendo DS. Had they even invented cable back then? Anna wondered.

"Not any other option, really. I knew they wanted this for me. To tell the truth, it seemed an awful fuss just to go to school," Nana Tate said, weaving a path of words and pauses.

A cold fat drop of condensation landed on Anna's leg, snapping her from the world long ago. Taking a measured sip from the glass that was still a little large for her hands, she placed it back on the table. Careful to place it atop the wet ring that was its home, its place in the world.

 "I did my best to be brave. I was going to get to Europe by ship, and that was very exciting to me." The joy of it still fresh in her words.

"Soon enough I was being introduced to the Captain, with a white beard and a white coat, a wrinkled face, and eyes cut so deep, I could hardly see their color." Nana Tate looked far off again. Then her smile returned.  "He looked like a giant to me. But a gentle one." He smiled and shook my hand.  I was told he was my great-uncle but I had never seen him before.  He bent down further when I smiled, I had been getting little toys and gifts since I was a lil' girl this was the first time I  met the one that sent them.  He took me up into a giants hug"

Another short pause and a warm, far off smile. "More then a hug, He closed his arms and I vanished," she said. Ever the story teller.

"Lost at sea," she added. Barely above a whisper.

 "He walked us around his ship, showed me my cabin and my bunk : looked small in there."  "He showed us the dinning hall they called a mess." The word mess in Nana Tate's southern accent was stretched and mashed until she pressed the sounds through her teeth to say it. Her father and the Captain walked together, the Captain who was married to Greta's aunt, always had doted on her like a grandchild, sending her trinkets and books he discovered in his travels around the world. She was traveling as his guest.

From the first vibration of the motor turning screws under her feet, Greta Tate began to lose her fearful feeling and began to take in the magic of life at sea. Behind her lay her present life, quiet and safe but ordinary. Ahead of her lay the unknown that meant adventure and a fresh uncertainty.  The farther away the land got, the more at peace she felt. Not totally at peace. It took two whole days before she was able to walk atop the straight lines of the boards laid into the deck. Putting one foot directly in front of the other, touching heel to toe as she walked.

Greta found the tastes and smells of the food in the mess so different from the blander food she ate at home. She tried it all. Pineapples and pomegranates. Yogurt. Olives. Fresh-caught fish. This was not a passenger ship, it was a freighter. But the cook, a merchant marine's son of a merchant marine who could have chosen a job at any fine restaurant in any city in the world, preferred the cramped, constantly moving little corner of the ship that was his place in his world. Just large enough to fit all he needed, just small enough for him to be master of every inch of the place. It was an unexpected and much appreciated perk for the men who chose the tiring, monotonous, lonely life of a sailor. Greta would spend time watching him chop, measure, and prepare the crews meals.

Once she had gotten used to being below decks in the deep of the ship, she loved it as much as on deck. The ride was quite different when she could not see outside and was much closer to the waterline. Pitching and rolling felt exaggerated. Down there she could hear and feel the ship working. It was always warm. Greta could smell the engine's oily sweat and feel its hot breath as it puffed and pushed the ship along.

The air was warmer still in the small galley, where bowls of colored powders and seeds filled the metal shelves. Greta watched the cook dip in his large fingers, tips coming out tinted a deep rusty red, and carefully sprinkle some unknown spice into tonight's dinner, tasting as he went, dipping a fat pinky and sucking it clean. As she sat there watching him work one day he said. "You want to look or would ya like to learn something? No one just stands about in my galley." So Greta started her life as a cook by peeling potatoes, shucked corn, learned to chop perfect little square pieces of tomato with a knife and mince onions without shedding a tear.  Take apart a chicken or pig learning what she had been eating all her life knowing it better.  For Greta it was an introduction to a life-long relationship with food and experimentation. She blushed with pride when a crew member enjoyed something that she had a hand in creating. Cookie also served as the ships doctor. "If I can stitch stuffing into a duck's ass I can stitch, up your arm" was the response he growled if anyone questioned his qualifications.

Each morning at breakfast, the Captain brought a chart to the table and let Greta mark the previous day's progress something she looked forward to greatly. She could see them marching slowly across the white paper sea of lines, numbers, and letters on the chart. Last night, he showed her, they had passed under the second letter "C" in Atlantic Ocean. The Captain would report how far they went, how fast and direction they traveled, currents and how deep to the ocean floor was below them. For Greta, this morning ritual was best on the mornings he would leave out some crucial bit of information and she would get to quiz him. The Captain often did not include the depth in the briefing, knowing she could not help herself but to ask. When she did, he would smile at her and say, "No human has reached the bottom in these here waters, Missy," in his best old-man-of-the-sea voice. This never failed to thrill her.

                                                                 ***

"It made me feel like an explorer," she said. "Felt like I done something kind of special just by being there." Anna understood and was enthralled, that feeling you get when you are looking at something for the first time in a new way. When a discovery becomes part of you and in some small way changes who you,  were going to become before that moment.

"When the sun went down the sea became black as ebony." Greta looked at Anna. Sensing her waiting. "That far out at sea, if the sky is clear at night, there is more star then sky. It almost wants to be daylight but the blackness is too powerful. So it is like daytime with a coating of darkness."

This thought struck Anna. Like life. Daylight with a sprinkling of darkness.

At night, Greta would stand watch with the Captain, his eyes cast to the sky. The Captain talked to the stars. But Greta only was listening.

"Out here they are your maps. If you can read them, they will get you home," the Captain said pointing up. "Because the ship is ever moving, the sky changes each night."

The Captain told her how sailors sang songs to one constellation as it set in the southwest and then a new song to the next constellation rising in up the East from the black line of a moonless sea. It was always amazing to Greta how the sea changed. One day it was flat, sun glinting off it like a friend inviting you to lie on your back in her vast blue arms. The next day it lashed at everything, angry and petulant, bent on revenge for some unnoticed slight, doing its very best to make her sick or knock her down. As the days dragged on, the magic of being at sea had lost some of its sheen to her.

"One night as I slept in my cabin," continued Greta, "The Captain sent a purser to wake me and tell me he wanted me up on deck on the double. The ship was cold and  all but the chug, chug, chug or the engine, kind of quiet. All the activity of the day bedded down. Still I wanted to know what was so important that I had to see in it the middle of the night." Another short pause. "I was up on the bridge before I noticed I was still in just my bed clothes." Nana Tate added this with a note of modesty in her voice that was not fully lost on Anna but not fully understood either. Like some relic of a bygone age. 

The Captain's eyes fixed out on the sea but he handed her a long coat that was so heavy she had to shift her feet to keep from being dragged over. The Captain said in a hushed voice, "I called you up on deck, young Miss, so you can witness one of the most extraordinary events a person can have while at sea. The passing of another ship." He pointed on the black horizon. Nana Tate took a breath.

 "You could see the horizon even at night." Nana Tate said. "It was that flat line that turned the stars off. Even in the darkest night, you could look out and see a long, smooth line where there were no more stars. I followed his finger out, and, there, far off on that black line, it looked like a tiny star had landed on the water. The star got bigger and bigger. I fixed my gaze on it, letting my eyes tear in the cold air before I would blink. Afraid I might lose sight of it. Soon I could see the light reflected back on the water as the star moved closer. It became huge. Its bright shape filled the night sky, blocking out some stars and washing others from the sky with her light.

The Captain pointed us a little closer to the great ship. Then he gave the command to shut down our engines and we sat silent in the water. The night was so quiet and still without the chug-chug-chug of the engines. For a long time, there was no sound at all. Then only the sound of waves crashing far off. But these waves never broke; they just kept a steady level of water slapping on water, getting louder. Then another sound, much lower, a moan, a single note. That sound made the water rumble and our now very little boat trembled at its master's feet." Nana Tate smiled.

It was thrilling. Anna could picture her Nana Tate as a little girl running out on deck to get a better view of the ship. She could see herself, head craned back, as the ship passed them. Far, far up happy tiny passengers waved down at her, their voices pushed by wind and half drowned by prop wash.  She swore she could hear music playing as it passed.

"I watched the water all in motion around our tiny metal island. All was movement and shuddering. The ship passed us, and the sounds of a silent nighttime at sea began to press its weight on us. The Captain looked down at me. "You saw history tonight, Miss. That is the R.M.S. Titanic off on her maiden voyage to New York"

"I didn't understand then, but you just never know when you are going to get to see something important. You have to keep your eyes open and not miss the important things as they pass. Some moments that you miss will hold onto you as long as you live." Nana Tate let all that settle inside Anna for a moment.

"Truth is, sometimes there is only that moment, that day. Take nothing for granted, child. Each day comes walking past fresh and new. When you fall asleep that night, the day should be in shreds around you. Opened, explored, loved, and used up fully.

 When she spoke of it to her granddaughter, it was just her memory laid out for Anna to examine. Free to take the bits she favored. Leaving the rest on the glass table next to the silver tray and melting ice.

Copyright © 2011 J. V. Wilder. All right reserved