Backing Up

   My wife, Doralyn, likes to back into parking spots. I prefer to just drive straight in.
   She enjoys the ability to drive right back out and be on her way and I enjoy the ability to back out into a wide open space, with no fear of scraping bumpers, bushes or buildings.

You're safe...

   Somehow or other, after having driven for the better part of forty-five years, I have never mastered backing up. I always find it subtly disorienting, having to shift around in my seat (I'm not as nimble as I once was), using mirrors (how truly trustworthy can they be?) and using my backwards death protection...er...depth perception... in order to get me and my car properly aligned and in the right spot. It's pretty well akin to asking me to look at three things at once when I generally have my hands full with one. 
 



You're not safe...

   I would get better if I did it more often. My skills are such that, with enough practice, I think I would be an excellent backer-upper. But, really, what adult practises backing up?
   My brother-in-law, Mike, can attest to my poor backing up skills. One day back in the early seventies, not long after we'd met and he was at our house in London visiting, I walked out to the driveway, hopped into my mother's car and promptly backed it up into Mike's Datsun 240Z--a sporty little car I had suddenly made less sporty. I'm not sure how you walk out to a driveway and back into a car that's  parked directly behind you, in the summer, in the sunlight. It's not like I clipped it while trying to drive around it---no, I drove directly into it.
   Mike would also be quite happy to recount the tale of me backing Doralyn's car down the concrete steps leading to one of the lower levels of the resort Mike and my sister, Jayne, own in Parry Sound. We had been staying in one of their cabins and, on our way out, I had been trying to back up and drive out forwards up the short hill leading away from our cabin. I totally misjudged where the steps were and ended up driving down the first two! It was only by the grace of Mike's pick-up and a sturdy chain that we were able to be extricated.
   These two offences are the ones which stick out in my mind the most but they do not account for the countless close calls where I avoided obstacles on the left only to discover how close I'd been to disaster on the right.
   This is why I drive forward into tight spaces, if at all possible. I don't even have a good handle on my own driveway. I can't tell you how many times I've backed one of our cars into the driveway only to discover I was now angled thirty or more degrees to either the north or south and quickly had to re-arrange things before being spotted.

 

   My new Honda is equipped with something I've never had before---a backup camera. Oh joy, one more distraction while I'm trying to do the backing up thing. Backup cameras are excellent if you're trying to avoid the suicidal maniac who was waiting for you to hop in your car so he could throw himself down behind your rear bumper. Apart from that, checking your mirrors and looking back over your shoulder should really be all you need to do.
   I guess I need to leave you with words of advice here. If you happen to see me driving toward you some day, then have no fear, the world is unfolding as it should. But if, perchance, I happen to be driving backwards.......                                

 

Cursive, Foiled Again!

   Back toward the end of summer, I found myself writing a couple of short little notes in birthday cards for a couple of my stepsons, Keenan and Callum.

If you've never seen it, this is what it looks like!

   I have been writing salutations in birthday cards, letters to people, notes to friends and family, exams, prose, poetry, and daily recording for over half a century now. When I have done this, I have a used a form of cursive writing that was very legible, neat and pleasing to the eye. In fact, I have received high praise from anyone who has had the pleasure of viewing it. 

   So it took me greatly by surprise, then, when I realized that neither of these two young men were actually able to decipher the messages I'd written in their birthday cards. They are both extremely intelligent lads but I might just as well have been writing in Sanskrit, for all they knew.
    Cursive writing is fading away as a viable means of communication. In this day of texting, e-mails and instant messaging, the need to actually hand write a note is almost non-existent. It also seems as though the handwriting you do run into is becoming more and more illegible all the time.
   I learned to write cursive in public school and I remember spending whole periods where we'd study the alphabet on display above the blackboard and attempt to copy it to a t--and a and b and so on--until our versions were almost identical to the ones we were trying to emulate.
   I've always had the ability to closely copy whatever was placed on paper in front of me and this was a skill which greatly came in handy when it came to cursive writing. I never was flowery and never really embellished my penmanship--I copied what I saw and it has held me in good stead ever since.
    These days, it also seems to be getting tougher to read other people's cursive writing and the younger the person is, the more difficult it seems. Written communication has almost become a printing/cursive hybrid anymore. We occasionally have staff meetings at my place of employment and someone needs to take the minutes. These are always handwritten and it's kind of funny looking around the table trying to find someone whose handwriting will be legible enough to transcribe later on!
   Not only do I do cursive wonderfully but I took four years of Latin in high school. Yes, I am a dinosaur. Not only can I write something you can't read I can tell you the ancient origin of it you won't care about!
   There could (will) be a day when we will need to pass around handwritten notes, because that will be the only option for communication. The ones of us who can still write cursive will be there, writing implements in hand, ready to rule the world.
   So, birthday number three rolled around, Quin's, and when the time came to inscribe something on his card, I had sadly learned my lesson---I printed.
     

I Am A Blasphemer (Apparently)

   In my most recent post, I talk about the idea that you need to consider who is going to be reading or listening to the things you write and say. You then need to understand that the things you say and do may bear some consequence.
   In an extremely ironic twist, just a couple of days after I wrote this, a comment popped up which was attached to a post I wrote last year called "Christians in the park". There is a link to that post here, if you weren't one of the ones that read it the first time around. Essentially, the post described my distrust of groups or individuals who seem to have used Christianity as a cornerstone for either their own gain or as part of a political agenda. I then cited examples, as quickly as they popped into my head, of some of history's worst offenders.
   The person's two-line comment appeared at the end of the post but I have since deleted it, thinking that readers might attempt to link back to its author's blog and give the person a sense of audience he or she might not deserve. The comment described the post as "pure blasphemy" and then added that "God will surely repay" me. In my brief reply to this person, I quoted one or two nice things I did say about Christianity and then left it at that.
   The person who commented did so anonymously. You were able to follow a link back to his or her own blog but it was a blog in title only, had no content of its own and did nothing to actually identify its author. I also have no idea if its author read my follow-up comment, which has since been deleted as well.
   In my three years of writing "Neanderings", this is actually the first truly negative comment I have encountered. Because of this, I was initially taken aback. I then had to remind myself of my own warning to others---be prepared for the consequences of what you say and do.
   I have personal friends and acquaintances who are Christians and who demonstrate this and espouse it on a regular basis. I have never received a negative comment or even an inquiry from them as to things I've said about Christianity in the past. It could well be that they simply have not followed the blog (not everyone I know actually reads it) and therefore have never questioned me about it. Apart from this particular post, I have written on the subject several times in "Neanderings". I think this is because I often find myself wondering about, for lack of a better term, the "meaning of life". I wonder what, if anything, lies beyond. Because this is an underlying current, I write about it. I attempt to be fair when I do this and I attempt to explain myself clearly.
   If you go back and read "Christians in the park" very carefully, you hopefully will get the point I attempted to make. I can see where it's possible that someone might consider it to be "blasphemy" if you only were to consider some of the associations I make in it and if you only read the accompanying pictures I culled from the internet. It could be that the post is viewed as tainted simply because of those things.
   If anything, this episode has reminded me that there is an audience out there and that they may have strong opinions of their own. My biggest discomfort here is that the person who left me the comment chose to do so anonymously. I, on the other hand, do not have an issue with identifying myself. My best guess is that the person leaving that comment considers themselves to be a Christian. If he or she is a Christian who feels it's appropriate to anonymously attack (at least it felt like a bit of an attack) another total stranger's beliefs then I feel as though they might somewhat easily fall into the category of yet another person or group with an agenda of their own who props it up under the guise of "Christianity". Which is to say, under what I understand a Christian to be, that they are probably not one at all. In trying to take a truly Christian approach to anything, I understand that one of the best things to do is ask yourself what would Jesus do?
   I have a bit of a hard time imagining Jesus attacking me over a blog post.

Be Careful What You Say

   Sometimes, you need to be careful what you say and to whom you say it. Sometimes, you also need to be careful what you do and who might view it. 

 

   Someone I know has a little blurby at the bottom of all the e-mails she sends out which goes something like this: "Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."
   I believe this is true; as much as we might be caught up in our own little turmoil, we need to remember that every other person we run into is in the midst of a turmoil of their own. How they are dealing with that turmoil may not be the same as how we are. We also need to remember that their ability to handle that turmoil might be on thin ice. It could be that they have completely lost that ability. Just at the moment that they may have totally lost the ability to handle the stressors of daily living, your path may cross theirs and what you say and what you do may have much more impact on the situation than you ever could possibly have imagined.

   You might save their life with a simple, random word or two. You might somehow or other ensure that their life ends, possibly right in front of you. It is not beyond the realm of reason that something you say or do might cause your life to end. I don't think there is a moment too innocent for this to happen.
   In light of all this, I pretty well constantly attempt to assess situations as they occur.
   I sometimes run afoul of other drivers out there. There is occasionally the temptation to lay on the horn or make some less than complimentary hand gesture and then I stop myself. I stop myself because in the grand scheme of things I don't know what effect this might have on that other person. Maybe there was a reason for why they were driving like that. Maybe it was just a brief moment of inattention, something we are all guilty of from time to time. Perhaps that person is speeding to the hospital because a loved one's been hurt. You just never know what a person's story might be.
   In this age of social media, you have the opportunity to interact in a variety of ways with hundreds of people all at once. Depending on the nature of that interaction, it might then be shared with hundreds of thousands of people.
  

This past Halloween, a young girl in Michigan made the mistake of dressing up for the occasion (as many people did) and then posting pics of herself on Facebook and Twitter (as many people did). Her mistake, though, was dressing up as a Boston Marathon bombing victim.
   She was immediately deluged with hate mail--some directed at her and much of it swirling around her. She had also previously made the mistake of posting nude pictures and her driver's licence on another social media outlet. This gave a whole bunch of extremely angry people access to some of her personal information. Soon, she and her family were receiving death threats. All of this because of a (terribly) misguided costume choice and then the ill-fated decision to make it so public.
   I occasionally find myself wrestling with what to put out there on social media. Most of it revolves around my quirky sense of humour and trying not to offend anybody with some of the stuff which comes out of my mouth. You have no idea how many times I've re-written a blog post or agonized over a Facebook comment so that no feelings would be hurt. This is all because you just never know how something you say might be interpreted or how an action might be seen.
   There is a world out there that is listening. More people than you might think are paying attention to what you say and do. As much as it might be enjoyable to say whatever comes to your mind whenever it gets there, it's essential to remember that this is not a consequence-less exercise. For the most part, we are all guilty of wanting to say or do things that will only get a positive response. Unfortunately, this is not the way the world works.
   This is not to say don't be outspoken or brave. Just be prepared for (but not scared of) what your bravery brings you in return.