TubaOrNotTuba

This is the time of year when we play a game we opened the real estate listings and try to figure out what we would take if it was offered. As I said this is a game which requires a great deal of imagination. I took a few minutes to look at what is available locally and my eye was caught by two offerings. One of them; a small church, pretty building with a great view and one caveat, you don’t get to keep the building there you must move it away on the back of a truck I assume, to who knows where. Someone has other plans for that great view out over the water. In another listing a house down in town. What I found curious about this listing found over the internet, was the description a concrete foundation with a clay floor. I can imagine it but I cannot imagine why would you go to all the work of pulling in a foundation without actually putting in a seller or a basement as we like to call them. Why would you fill it full of dirt I’m going to have to find someone with more experience than I to explain the reasoning. We also have a lot of land for sale around here and the prices in every case make no sense. This is the time of year when tourists drive by and decide that this is where they would like to live or retire if they had unlimited funds. Most of those lots will still be for sale in six months time. As I said this is the time of year when people dream; not when they actually build things. You would want to know what winter looks like first.

I have realized that the only one who is responsible for recording my history is me I cannot depend upon my siblings nor my progeny they have a different set of memories and with that comes another responsibility. If I do not try to recall what I learned about my ancestors along the way it will be lost. You can say that it is not important but with that goes the idea that no history is important and we know that is not the truth let me look at what I know of my grandparents. I know their names?? I know where they were born and died and lived at least in part I have visited the homes of my grandparents. I know their relative professions and their children. A good start; all of my grandparents came from small villages very small in some cases the only house around was theirs. The family homes of my grandparents are still in place. A rare thing in an area where house fires consumed so much. I have been to their graves and I have tried to let my own children know some of the story. Their names are mentioned from time to time in the daily newspapers. No infamy, rather that they were known as members of their own community. If we go back a further decade or two I can actually tell you a little about my great grandparents. The same sort of information where they came from and where they died where they lived in part. I was asked recently if I knew anything about the home of one of my grandmothers; a question from someone that knew her when they were very young and I can tell you that the house was across that field for what that is worth, that house was gone before I had memories. I have visited the home of my great grandparents on one side and I have a very important photograph for me, that was another house consume by fire. What will my own grandchildren know of my life? Who will tell my anecdotes? This blog is in part a way of passing on memories to others. They may not know it, but this sort of thing will be important to them later in life. I will probably pass on a little of my music, too personal to be easily shared and if you ask who were my dogs I can give you that information. Although it has little importance. We all edit our identity’s for better or worse I hope that my own children will have a few details about me to be added to their memory bank. These thoughts came to me after listening to a blog about what was remembered from the days of slavery. Sound recordings were a new technology but we have snippets, important in the larger scheme of things.

Enough years have passed that I can talk about my worst job interview ever. It was not a crisis but it does bring back memories of how the corporation will lie to you. You see in those days there were lots of factories and in fact I had worked for one of those factories less than a year before had a great time working there left on good terms we’re back to school and now I needed another job I assumed that my old job was sitting there waiting for me because I didn’t know any better and so I went to the personnel office introduced myself and asked to speak to the personnel director I laid my case out that I was a returning employee that I expected to start again immediately he looked up from his papers took my resume read through it quickly and then told me that my old job was not available that year however seeing that on my resume I had listed taking sociology courses he felt he had something that would be even more interesting for me than what I had done the previous summer I could have a job in the foundry I did not know what that meant but I was game I could handle any job you could put before me so I said sure and reported to work several days later. My first task was to put big weights on top of the sand molds the weights were too large for me to even lift so they decided that that was not the proper task for me. I could have a job working on the hot cast shakeout again just meaningless words and so I said sure and was brought down past all the heavy machinery to a corner where I could stand by a moving belt; this was a foundry with an outside wall against a snow bank and the temperature went from very cold to very hot very quickly as well the machinery was not well maintained so I spent a portion of each shift with a shovel digging out around the belt. I did not require many days to figure out that this was a really terrible way to spend a summer and after a tragic accident on the shop floor, I went home spent the night awake reported to manpower the next morning looking for something or anything else and never returned to the foundry. The personnel director had lied and that was all he was getting from me.

During all those years did I spend in school there was one big lie. Quite apart from all the little lies that were told. Somebody was convinced that studying mathematics would be of value later in life. Spoiler alert, it hasn’t been other than at the most cursory level those hours that I was placed in agony trying to decode quadratic equations and exponents did not serve me not even once in sharp contrast with my hours with a dictionary trying to decipher old Latin texts was actually a value and my courses in pure science for example chemistry and physics were good but the average run-of-the-mill mathematics class was just one way to keep us in the same place for an hour so the rest of the world could go on. I hope my children escape now. You may wonder has anyone ever asked me to go back to math class? No not even for an hour. I did spend time as a substitute teacher in mathematics where I learned that all the answers were kept in a special book but that was hardly the point of the exercise. Once I learned that the answers were all known the problem seemed less obvious. In the same vein, I did not find my fortune while studying equations. I have a larger problem my phone number is being targeted. I get more than a dozen calls every couple of hours from scammers. I wonder if they can answer mathematical questions. A Turing test if you will, prove that you have intelligence but that won’t happen each time I get close to being able to query the caller, they go away. They figured out that I have no money to give them and that I am trying to waste their time like a modern day math teacher.