The Suffield Observer (https://thesuffieldobserver.com/category/columns/through-the-looking-glass/page/2/)
My husband and I were discussing the latest political positions taken by Alan Dershowitz, a liberal law professor whose critiques of our current president have sometimes been positive and sometimes negative.
Paige’s husband called not long ago looking for anecdotes about her high school years that he could use in her eulogy. I wasn’t much help even though she and I were very close during high school. Her career in adventurous social activities blossomed more in college. In high school we used to take long walks which we called Braeburning because we would wind up at an elementary school called Braeburn, where we’d sit on the swings and chat. On one of these walks we decided that we would not speak any English; unfortunately Paige was taking German and I was taking Spanish, so communication was challenging.
My favorite teacher, Dr. Sylvan Barnet, died recently. I was glad that I’d finally emailed him and told him of my visit to the New York University’s English department. A friend and I had stopped in to visit our friend Paige who was employed there as a secretary. Paige sat us down and put us to work stuffing envelopes for a mailing, and as we were stuffing and chatting, the head of the English Department emerged from his office. He asked us where we had gone to school and when I said “Tufts,” he asked if I’d ever met Sylvan Barnet there.
The name “Ellsworth” has cropped up a couple of times on my family tree as a middle or first name, and this made me wonder if we had a yet undiscovered Ellsworth line of ancestors.
Not long ago television news reported on high school students who had invented a password storage device and were setting up a business to sell it. The device stored passwords and allowed the user to access them by displaying a fingerprint. The whole password situation is very annoying. It is often tempting to decide against visiting a site or doing anything on it, simply to avoid adding yet another password to your collection. Many people use the same password over and over, a practice the experts strongly disparage.
Facebook has a group called “The Alan Watts & Buddhism Study Group” of which I’m a member. I don’t read all of the postings but one recently caught my eye. A member had asked simply “What is the meaning of life?” Evidently a lot of people think about this, because the question received the greatest number of responses I’ve ever seen. I culled out the first 112 responses so I could see what the consensus might be. The most numerous response with 24 votes was that the meaning was simply to live; this is close in concept to its runner-up which was “there is no purpose.” So it seems the majority of respondents reject the question with an attitude of “don’t be silly; just get on with it.” The Indian mystic Osho was quoted as saying “Life is the purpose.”
Other responses fell into categories of doing good, learning, and acceptance.
It was my younger brother who pulled me into becoming a Facebook member. He’d been following the activities of his three kids on it and thought I should be tuned in to the activities of the younger generation as well. So I floundered around on my computer, filled out the member form, and managed to upload my picture up onto it. My first friends were members of my immediate family, but I came across more and more friends and relatives who were also on Facebook. After a high school reunion, some of my classmates “friended me” as well and I started learning about the lives of classmates I had lost touch with.
Recently I went on a binge of reading books about North Korea. The books below are non-fiction, but I want to mention the novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. It shows the struggle of Korean people trying to carve out lives for themselves in Japan, both before and after World War II. The Japanese were extremely biased against Koreans. Resident Koreans were very rarely able to get full citizenship.
Several years ago a friend who supports the Libertarian Party invited me to come along to a weekend gathering of libertarians in New Hampshire. It was called the Porcupine Freedom Festival – PorcFest for short. It was, generally speaking, a happy gathering of people who shared the political view that less government would make life better. Its name derives from the mascot of the Libertarian Party, the porcupine. It was only the second or third time this event had taken place but there was a good crowd of about 100 people staying in a local motel or camping out in trailers and tents using the bathroom facilities provided by Rogers Campgrounds in Lancaster, NH.
As more of my friends and relatives have downsized, moved, or died, I have become conscious of how much clutter I am leaving behind for my family to clean up after my death; and I’ve started making plans to reduce the number of my possessions, leaving me with a simple and tidy environment.