My kids think I am cool again

I have a long and painful history with cars. First there was the '79 Pinto that I bought right after my mission for $450, because that was how much I had. It was also known as the peach bomb, because that was its color and that is what it was. It had the advantage of having a hole in the floor that allowed me to measure my speed by how fast the yellow stripes passed by. Still, it was good enough to get engaged to my wife with. We sold it shortly after the wedding because, well, it was a Pinto.
Next came the Mercury Topaz we got from my uncle. It was okay, except for the a leaky power steering unit and a really bad paint job. And an alternator that kept going out and a bunch of other little things. When I had to drive down to Ft. Huachuca for Army Officer Basic Course, I needed something that a new Lieutenant could be seen in. I bought a 92 Eclipse. It was totally stripped down--no power windows, no cruise control, not even power steering--which was a plus at the time, because that meant it couldn't go out on me. What it did have was a manual transmission that was a whole lot of fun and a comfortable front seat that I could drive for hours without getting tired. I really liked that car.
When I got home, we sold the Eclipse to my brother, and the Topaz to a woman around the corner, who promptly wrecked it--and then put full insurance coverage on it. With the money from those two we bought a '94 Geo Prizm. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the Prizm, except that it was a Prizm with absolutely no personality, and not enough leg room--which made it very uncomfortable on cross-country drives. Three children in the back was also an adventure. Years later in Texas (land of F-250's and Ford Mustangs) I once picked up an inactive youth in it. His first words to me were, "why don't you have a truck?"
With our family growing, and with my first real job, we purchased my parents Dodge Grand Caravan and I was faced with the fact that my life was now well and truly over. The mini van is a very practical vehicle. It allows the kids to sit far enough behind the parents that they can beat on each other with impunity, or fight over who gets the prime seat in the middle row--which is only prime because it is closer to the treats on long trips. The downside of a mini van is once again the position it forces you to keep your legs (in my case) or your shoulders (in my wife's case) in. It also shouts "I-would-be-driving-an-SUV-right-now,-but-I-realize-that-I will-NEVER-have-a-chance-to-take-this-thing-off road,-so-why-bother" about as loud as I can imagine.
In Texas, my car journey took a strange turn. In the same week, my wife and I both independantly had the impression that a family in our ward who was struggling, could really use our Prizm to replace their broken down car. So I began looking for a replacement. A few days later, I thought I had found the perfect solution. On Ebay, I found a 95 eclipse that i thought would bring me back to the days of happy driving I knew in Sierra Vista, Arizona. So I put what I thought was a low bid on it--and won. It was great, until I went to pick it up, and discovered what I had bought. There was no oil in it (leaked on the ground out of the leaky head gaskets, as it turns out) missing a spare tire. On the way home the battery died completely. I spray painted the hood--in retrospect, I should have painted it yellow, because it was a lemon--but it was still pretty fun to drive, when it ran.
For the last month, it has been back in the shop again. Our normal mechanic (with whom I am now on a first-name basis, and who now has a new ski-boat) couldn't get it running right. I took it in to the dealer, and they wanted to put in a new computer for the second time in two years. It was time to get rid of it.
So here is the next attempt at driving something with a little self-respect. It is a 2005 Acura RSX type S.
Ryan likes it anyway.
For those who say, "You can't get all your kids into that," I answer, "That is correct."
It has a 6-speed manual transmission that is a whole lot of fun and a whole lot of zip.
It also has a moon-roof, which I learned on google, is different from a sun-roof because it has a motorized retraction system and a tinted glass window. And although the leather seats and the Bose sound system are nice, I am just glad it doesn't kill on me at random moments like the eclipse. As an added bonus, the blue paint almost perfectly matches the blue covering on my Stik.

Stuff happens when I am in Berlin

Stuff always seems to happen when I am in Berlin. As a missionary, I experienced the reunification of the two German republics first hand. I wasn’t here for the fall of the Berlin wall, but I took part in much of what came immediately after. I thought at the time I understood what was happening, but now I am not so sure. I know so much more now about the complexities of German history that much of what at the time seemed so black-and-white now takes on a rich texture of colors and patterns even as it fades into the past at the same time.

Ten years later I arrived in Berlin with my family in the shadow of 9/11 and the threat of a new war on terror. The expected bombs soon fell in Afganistan and soon thereafter the (from me) unexpected ones in Iraq.

In that year that everything changed for the United States I filtered it all through the BBC and the German newspapers. I still had trust in President Bush to do the right thing, and I am still not sure whether he did or not. Certainly nothing turned out as we expected it to. One could argue that the fall of the wall and the fall of the twin towers are related. The Soviet decline begins with their failure in Afghanistan, and caused Gorbachev to rethink the entire foreign policy of the Soviet Union. So Bin Laden was a product of the Cold War and that the Soviet pull-out of Afganistan and the later US failure to help the country stabilize in the resulting vacuum set the world down the path that put American soldiers in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Now another ten years have passed and I sit in the Goethe-Institute I read of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden and the new awakening of the Arab Spring. I am 40 instead of instead of 30 instead of 20 and I wonder what these events mean for the future. I no longer think that I can make sense of it the way I thought I could before.
As any president would, Obama is taking credit for the success of the operation against Bin Laden, but it appears that the groundwork that led up to the assault on his compound in Pakistan goes back to well before the begin of Obama’s presidency. The president has also taken some credit for the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere that the newspapers have been calling the “Arab Spring.” Yet I wonder how much of these changes would have been possible if it had not been for the US policies of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in the decade leading up to today.

And yet another “yet,” it is clear that the Bush presidency and the US made countless mistakes and miscalculations in their foreign policy during the last ten years, and I wonder how much we have hindered the possible progress that could have been made in that time if we had not created so much animosity for the West over the last decade. Is it possible that change could have come quicker if we had left the muslim world alone, if they had left us alone? If we had reacted differently?

Many, many years ago--I think it was the summer after my mission when I returned to Germany to visit friends for the first time as a non-missionary, my good friend Lutz Wagner gave me his father's iron cross from the first world war. (I am pretty sure it was his father and not his grandfather--I believe he was already quite old when Lutz was born).

I was very honored by the gift. With Germans, the idea of friendship is deeper than it is most of the time with Americans, it is something closer to family than anything else. At least with the Wagners, with whom I lived for several months, I know the relationship goes beyond simple friendship. So you can imagine how I felt when I looked one day (for a class) and could not find the iron cross anywhere. To make matters worse, this summer Lutz mentioned that he had had a medal from his father and didn't know where it was anymore. I had to admit to him that he had given it to me years ago, but that I couldn't find it anymore.

Of course there is a happy end to the story. A couple of weeks ago my parents threatened to throw out all my stuff that was still at their house (it's less than 20 years since I lived there) if I didn't go through the boxes and decide what I wanted to keep. Guess what I found? I feel a little like the woman in the parable that cleaned her whole house and found the money she had lost.

Objects are really just things that should not be important to us at all, but when they become symbols then that changes them altogether. I can't help but think about the changing meaning behind this one. When it was given, it was a symbol of one man's service to his country--a country that, by the time the cross was awarded, did not even exist anymore. For years during the socialist era, it must have sat in a drawer, nearly forgotten as it would have represented a time of capitalist empiricism to some had it been displayed too openly. It was also a symbol of war and militarism and so somewhat ambivalent in the best of times. To Lutz, I would think that it would serve as a memory of his father. I should probably give it back to him.

To me, however, it is a reminder that the family I am a part of is bigger than that I was born to, or that have been born to me, that there are people that I hope to enjoy the eternities with. That, I think, is what it means to have a Pearl of Great Price.

On what a stone has to say

When I was my son’s age, I discovered fantasy literature in the form of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien particularly captured my imagination with the utterly realistic world he created. The major contributing factor of this realism of course was Tolkien’s facility with language. Tolkien’s own love of languages, etymology, and literature infected me and played perhaps too great a role in my decision to study language–probably because my own love of reading blossomed in the midst of hobbits and elves on the fields and hills of Middle Earth.

Key to the hobbits’ adventures was a dwarvish map written in a runic script. The runes were a secret and magic script that led the way to treasure and dragons and access to the world learning outside the Shire. True to Tolkien’s own personality, each hobbit that leaves his home becomes in his own right a scholar of the land that adopts him, brining back the language, learning, and history of that land.

It was a pleasant surprise then, when I discovered in my courses on the history of the German language, that Tolkien’s dwarvish runes were not original to him, but borrowed from the nordic germanic tribes. For the Norsemen too, runes were possessed of a magic wielded only by the select few. I suppose the magic still holds, even if the secret is widely known: if you put something into writing, you call it into being, and therefore you gain power over it as you make it present again – re-presenting it – in the text. The Norse understood this in a way that we have forgotten.

When I went to Sweden this summer I hoped I would find some of these runes. They were often engraved into standing stones–like Stonehenge in England. The stones themselves had meaning both in the way they were arranged and in the act of erecting them. They stand, like the Norse ideal of manhood. Upright. Proud. Immovable. Strong. Timeless. They are Standhaft. When I see them, my own Viking heritage stirs. They represent all the things we cannot always be, but wish we were, and I wanted to find one for myself.

I had heard of prehistoric Norse cemetery that had been discovered south of Stockholm, and which happened to be within walking distance of my hostel. I set out to find this cemetery on a beautiful June morning; the sun was bright and the air fresh after the rain of the previous day. About a mile down the path I began to see a series of stone circles sticking up out of the forest floor. There were other geometric shapes as well, mostly triangles and quadratic figures. It was a curious experience. The stones themselves are ageless: unshaped by any hand, they seem as old as the earth itself. But at some point someone gathered them together and arranged them, and even this act is removed from me by over a thousand, maybe two thousand years. For all that time they have remained, unmoved, a more constant part of the environment than even the generations of trees that have sprung up and died around them. Their permanence served as a contrast to the transience of the human hands that placed them, and my distance from those people, despite the fact that I was standing on the very place where they must have stood long before. The signposts said they were grave markers, but if there was any significance to the layout of the stones, it remained unclear to me, except that their very placement gave the stones meaning. It set them apart so that they were no longer just stones, but a message–Remember us, even though we are gone, we were here. This was our place. We lived. We worked. We created. We were.

At the time I was only struck by the beauty of their extreme age and their stunning simplicity. I was also mildly disappointed that they lacked any runes–any writing to connect me to them. All these other meanings come to me as I sit and write about them months later, when I realize that they had much to say and indeed were able to say much despite their silence. But at the time I resigned myself to the fact that this was as close as I was going to get to Norse paganism and so I set of in search of the coast and the seagulls.

On my way to the airport, however, I made one final stop at the castle Gripsholm in Mariefeld. The afternoon was getting on, but the day was just as beautiful as it had begun. I knew nothing about the castle except that Kurt Tucholsky used to take his vacations there. However, as I walked around the castle, I was surprised to find these two rune stones standing in the courtyard. I do not know if they have always stood on this spot, or as I suspect, they were moved here by the builders of the castle. It doesn’t much matter to me either way. As I looked at them, I remembered the one with the snake’s head from pictures in my graduate classes. Between the unexpected surprise at discovering them and the delight at touching a thousand-year-old inscription (okay maybe only 900 years) it was the perfect end to my trip to Sweden.

At one time I could puzzle out the sound of the language on the stones from the runes, even if the language itself was beyond me. But now I can’t remember the value of most of the symbols. In English it reads this stone was set up by Tola in memory of her son, Harald. He was Ingvar the Far-traveled’s brother They fared like men far after gold and in the east gave the eagle food. They died southward in Serkland.” According to the marker next to the stone, “Giving the Eagle food” means they killed enemies, and the “Far Traveled’s” expedition to Serkland is mentioned in many other rune inscriptions. These rune stones are therefore Cenotaphs, grave markers erected in memory of one who died far away and whose body cannot be returned home. They represent an absence, a symbol of what is not there.

To me these rune stones and the standing stones that predate them become a metaphor for language. Words are symbols for ideas or objects that are not there. The words we use re-present an absence, and even though the sound or shape of a word is meaningless in itself, the use we put them to–the way we arrange them opens them to an infinite number of possible meanings.

The stones do nothing. They just “stand there.” They exist in the moment of nunc stans (Thank you Scott Abbott), of “standing now” in the present. Yet they carry with them a connotation of extreme age, of events long past, of the people who touched them and placed them and wrote upon them. The language of a good book or a good poem does the same thing for me. The words only exist as I read them–before that they were just marks on a page. But as my eyes pass over them, the words connect me to an author who is absent–sometimes long absent. Whatever other message they might bear, Their texts become a monument that says, remember me. I was here. This was my space. I worked. I lived. I created. I am.

Noch einmal für Thucydides

"A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors has its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

--Thucydides, classical era Greek historian