Stepping up

So we just got back from Joe's final college visit, this time to the University of Pennsylvania (not Penn State).  It's a small campus, or seem that way, with very old buildings and lots of money.  What a joy to be there on a beautiful fall day for their homecoming. Images: boys in khaki pants and blue jackets standing around looking awkward; tall thin man yelling at his family, the tattoos on his neck stretched and uglier than before; Joe talking to me, reading to me, telling me jokes all the way down there and back.  It's a fancy school, very competitive and cliquish, but not a bad place for Joe.  The whole Ben Franklin idealism and activism might not be as vibrant day-to-day as it is on campus.  But it was a very lovely, demanding and strong campus.  It would change Joe's life to go there.

But the reason I'm writing is because soon after we parked, far up the block the marching band started.  Their double drumming and keyboards sounded like like a war starting, or a party, or both.  It was hard not to dance to it.  And Joe realized his polymath friend Jacob might be in that crowd, so we ran ahead -- sure enough, there was Jacob.  He was so happy to see Joe, and hugged him.  That small gesture, the welcome, the friend who make it all real, could have been the moment Joe needed to help him make his part of the decision of where to go to college (the college itself makes the other half, of course).  And I think I saw it there, as we wound through the campus at the tail of the marching band, a little celebration in progress: the small moment where Joe steps up into a new future, as if stepping into an invisible bus that drove his future off but left him walking next to his friend.  A small moment.  I was moved by it, and proud. Again.

Alien Figures

They clean my office once a year.  I do it less frequently.  So by the time I got back after the cleaning weekend, my floor was immaculate, and all the year's mail, essays, books, cables, cords, and binders were put back approximately in the same place as they were when I left, but not quite.  It made me feel that I was walking into someone else's office, like I was a foreigner to the place.  I moved stuff around, puttered a little.  And then, hiding in plain sight but made visible by the subtle changes over the weekend, I found a small framed child's drawing behind my printer, down low.  

The drawing is on construction paper and mounted in a super-cheap pressed paper frame. Behind the glass, in contrasting colors, are two of those weird alien shapes small children make when they are just starting to draw humans, big heads and spidery limbs.  It's labelled "Joe" and "Daddy."  Ok, this would ordinarily not make me pause -- I've seen it a hundred times and more -- but I've been missing Joe lately, especially now that he's going off to college soon, and maybe also a little because he's on his way to New Orleans, flying with his brother and a bunch of other Lutherans to demolish uninhabitable houses there and start making way for the new.  I hear they will also spend some time in the Superdome with 30,000 other faithful, reflecting on their spiritual condition, perhaps upsetting the tables in their own cluttered temples. I'm really glad Joe gets a chance to do this.  He's an intellectual kid and some of the church's habits do not line up well with the scientific mind he's got.  The soul work will do him good, help him know that he's not so alone or so special.  


He's certainly special to me, though.  Yesterday I was driving toward his workplace and saw him walking on the roadside, long, lanky, with that loping gait that white nerdy kids have, all tennis shoes and elbows, and I watched as he looked up and slowly — I saw it gather on his face — come to recognize first the car and then the driver.  He was thrilled to have me pull over, and as he folded himself in, I noticed that his cheekbones and jaw are growing into an adult face, his features growing in, and becoming handsome, really quite handsome.  When we were in the store a few minutes later, teenaged girls would pause their gaze on him for a beat and then -- continue on, shopping for their candy or makeup or whatever it is young girls go to the drug store for.  He is oblivious.


He is a deep-feeling kid, though.  When he was young, we used to dance.  He and I played the hell out of Dwight Yokam's This Time and Pearl Jam's Ten in my first house, in my first living room, first marriage and first child. It was a special time and I knew then, but quietly, the way you will run across an image in a book and know you should remember it, you can hear it ring like a church bell, but the supper is boiling over and the cat is stuck in the basement and the snowplow just walled you in again at the top of your driveway. And so you live through it and store it away hurriedly, hoping the odors and rhythms will be traced somewhere in your Lascaux skull, fearing that it will be discovered as something primitive and undecipherable in later years.  

He would reach up sometimes, very small, and say "Daddy, pick you up?," confusing his pronouns, something that much amused me.  And we danced with abandon (such a lovely phrase), me with a heavy, hot, sweaty baby and him with a taut graduate student new father and us grooving on the riff, listening to the freight-train distance and joy in Dwight Yokam's guitars. Seems like it was always winter, the low sun coming in through the small windows.  At maybe three years, one day he handed me a picture of us, the one I mentioned above, with Daddy's stick arm, fingerless, reaching out to the baby's fingerless stick arm, and he gave it to me with great solemnity. He said to me that it was a picture of us dancing.  He was giving me a gift only I was to have, something the rest of the world could not understand. And I was honored by it.

And yet I have something to apologize for and perhaps one day to expiate: when I said that I would frame it — I was so proud of it — he started to cry.  No, he insisted.  He didn't want anyone to see it.  He was surprised I'd even think of doing that, I sensed. It was our secret, our shared knowledge.  Oh, that was sweet.  So what did I do?  I framed it the next day in that cheap frame and put it in my office. The next time he came by, of course, I didn't even try to hide it and when he saw it, he was horrified — and started to cry.  


He is oblivious to that time, I'm sure does not remember it, but I do.  I remember how I mangled that secret.  And today when I found the picture again it made me choke up, for I remembered again breaking it, the promise, and felt how long ago that time had been already. I am sorry, and yet the picture stays on my desk. And what do you do with regrets like these?

We still reach toward each other, alien figures that we are. I have enjoyed this good, kind boy this summer, which is about all I can do, planning travels and talking about ideas and colleges and people. This sturdy and ephemeral young man, this opinionated and hale youth, the one I recently carried and sang to ("I'm a thousand miles from nowhere / And there's no place I'd rather be") is growing up because and in spite of my mistakes, and today I am filled with a sharp mix of pride and regret that is ameliorated only by picturing him on his own adventures, ones I won't be there to write about.

Joe's taught global warming is a myth

Joe wrote on Facebook: 

Joe Plvan-Franke

I've had two science teachers in a row now lecture me on how global warming is a myth.

I'm scared.

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Dad writes: I think there is some confusion on your teachers' part about the difference between theory and fact.  Theories are not false or true: they are ways of explaining things, and they are more or less useful.  Evolution is a useful theory because it mostly fits the crazy data we have (fossils, finches on various islands, etc).  The theory that the earth is flat is less useful because it can't explain much about how boats sail around the earth or what the astronauts saw from space.  

That Global Warming is happening is a strong theory for me.  It explains what the records of temperature show, the retreat of the glaciers, the breakup of the Bearing Strait.  But maybe (probably) your teachers are talking about the theory that global warming is caused by human forces.  That buying fossil fuels, in particular, has hastened or enhanced an overall warming.  Since we are buying a million years of fossil fuels every year (took a million years of sunlight to create that much "fossil" fuel).

But it's not clear that humans are the central cause.  Does that mean "global warming is a myth"?  Of course not!

Causal forces in complex systems are hard to separate out (evolution, immune responses, changing scores on national tests).  When you can't point to a single cause, some people say there are no facts and nothing to do.  They say "It's all a myth."  But that's not right, IMHO.  In complex situations, you have theories (like evolution) that we can take very seriously. If I were an oil company, I would very much be inclined to say that global warming theories are cute distractions, but until there were "facts," nothing needs to change.  There needs to be lots of data collected and reflected on, sure, but there comes a point where you have to be persuaded by the entirety of a situation: the interrelationship of polar ice-cap melting, the burning of a million years of fossil fuels in five decades, species extinctions, habitat destruction, topsoil depletion, salination of cropland and the like are all parts of a bigger story: we are destroying our physical space here.  All of these interrelated forces need to be taken very seriously because they are part of the same event.  

Saying global warming is a myth is like looking at a massive famine in Africa and saying “there is no proof it was preventable. The real problem might be the poor food distribution system, or the antiquated farming practices, or AIDS weakening the population, or pollution of groundwater, or….”  The question is not whether any one of those likely exacerbating factors is the one key cause of the starvation; the real problem is how we can look at the big picture and figure out how to respond to complex situations. Saying “global warming is a myth” is silly because it pretends to simplify a complicated situation.  

What “global warming is a myth” really means, in practical terms, is “we don’t have to do anything different.”  It allows us to ignore the overall big-picture of our health as a planet and stand still until we figure out all the symptoms, causes, and diagnoses.  So my bottom-line point: saying that global warming is a myth says we need facts, not theories, before we act (and the facts will never arrive with the clarity and obviousness people expect facts to have).  Saying global warming is a myth allows us to continue with the very comfortable short-term idea that “business as usual is fine.”  And that is a myth much more dangerous than any other one your teachers might present to a class of impressionable students.  

Alex is right: there is no way to sift that mountain of data and come to a simple “yes or no” conclusion about the cause or even the nature of global warming.  But that is no reason to take it very seriously and to look at the big picture, the environmental whole.  We’re using global warming as an excuse to ignore that issue, one that in my mind is more important than all the rest.  For me, the question is one about health, overall environmental health, sustainable health that extends past you and me and down to and past our grandchildren.  That's not being discussed, and breezy dismissals of global warming are not helping.

By the way, I’m very interested in arguments such as this one (quote below), which seems to admit that it’s money, not health, that drives the argument against global warming: “even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that it is far more cost-effective to adapt to, rather than to try to prevent, any possible human-caused climate changes” (under “Robert Carter” on http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/).

So there.  My 2 cents.