Who's there? Sounds in the night

How to Remember With No Strings Attached

Written for the Orland Park Patch -- March 22, 2012

Arthur (Ed) Wall



Tom noticed it before I did. My cat sleeps more than I do, but more lightly, so he woke me up not long after I had gone to bed. He had heard someone in my TV room, and he didn't like that. Tom and I have lived by ourselves in an Orland Park condo ever since my wife died.

It was an alert neighbor, who noticed I had forgotten to close my garage door. He popped in to tell me about it. I thanked him, he left, I pushed the button to close the door, returned to bed and apparently sloshed the experience around in my head like the kind of dream that's still there when you wake up.

I had just celebrated in birthday, denying that my 87 candles had anything to do with the arrival of 80-degree weather. When I woke up with that garage door episode in my mind, I realized that it was time to deal with the hazards of short-term memory loss. Senior discounts may include a 20 percent reduction in memory. A 15 percent discount for eye glasses may be society's way of dealing with 20 percent loss of eyesight.

I don't get around as fast as I used to, even though I keep my power chair and scooter batteries fully charged. It is more than good luck to live just a mile from my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. I'm surrounded by good neighbors, so serene in their neighborliness that sometimes I don't even know who shoveled snow away from my door.

When there is no snow I glide around neighborhood sidewalks on my four-wheel scooter. I see other seniors, and juniors too, on wheels or on feet. A scooter will take its operator anyplace where the sidewalks go, despite the thumps from uneven walkways and the challenges of misfit mini-ramps from sidewalk to street.

There are a lot of us in Orland Park, Tinley Park and nearby areas who forget things. I don't want you to wake up some night to shouts from a good neighbor in your home, so I'll tell you what I did. I made a list of things I have forgotten at one time or another, and printed a form via my computer.

I've arranged this simple form on a half sheet of letter-size paper, so I can make a quick and easy check each night before bedtime. The things I need to check are whether outside doors are locked, the garage door is closed, the thermostat is adjusted, blinds closed, prescriptions swallowed, outside lights turned on and Tom fed.

The final issue, of course, is how to remember to fill out the memory form. If an answer to that comes in a dream, I'll let you know.

Once upon a time the GOP...

In western New York state my great grandpa, Marcus Kinne, cheered for John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party. Fremont lost to James Buchanan in the 1956 election, but Great Grandpa Kinne (Kinney) had a winner next time.

Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant after him, were talked about as though they were family friends, although they were not, when I was a little kid living with my grandparents. Everybody I knew when I was eight or ten years old in Chautauqua County, N.Y., was a Republican.

Jamestown, my hometown, had been an active station on the underground railroad. It provided many men for the Union army. I saw a few of the Civil War veterans during Fourth of July parades. By then, 1930 or thereabouts, their marching days were only memories and they rode in open cars.

My grandparents and aunts and cousins, enthusiastic members of the party of Lincoln, would be astonished by the 2012 GOP and the social and political elitism celebrated by its presidential candidates.

When I was born the president was Calvin Coolidge. When I was a little kid, Herbert Hoover was president. After that, I became a teenager and Franklin D. Roosevelt lived in the White House. The minimum voting age was 21, so I cast my first president ballot for Harry Truman. By then my grandparents had passed on to a non-partisan realm, and never knew that the child they once nourished grew up to vote for a Democrat. In some respects the two major parties had swapped priorities.

A group has complained that some deceased Jews were baptized by strangers, who were asked to cease and desist. I have no reason to think that my grandparents and their parents have thus been baptized, and I’m certain they would not approve. But if anyone should tamper with those 19th century records, maybe they will be kind enough to change great grandpa’s party affiliation to Democrat, the current party of emancipation and benevolent reconstruction.

A New World

A short story

By Jacob Wall

Ten years ago, an unusual little piece of maldoing slipped its way into the computer system. It danced past firewalls and antivirals, right into Iran’s fuel enrichment plant. Much as a master of espionage, its presence was entirely undetected until it spun the centrifuges out of control, creating a very detectable explosion.

And so, with the creation of this virus, Stuxnet, as it was called, began a new age of warfare. One that is not waged in the real world but rather in a world of electrical pulses and signals, yet in a way that has very real world consequences.

Here I am now, some ten years later with a small piece of paper certifying my aptitude, hanging on the wall just behind me. My team and I are waiting for the next attack, the next activist, terrorist, criminal, or country to try their hand. Our eyes start to glaze over as we stare at our computers, not a signal of something gone wrong. Similar to those scientists monitoring Natanz those ten years ago, we see everything, yet nothing.

The interesting thing about criminals in the cyber world is that they rarely take the form of criminals. They do not dress in leather, they do not ride Harleys, they do not beat people, and they most likely would help an old lady cross the street. Yet, when they sit down at their computer, they change, they become mad scientists, and that’s when something bad happens – a few million disappear, a few planes crash, a few blackouts roll across New York. It is for these reasons that everyone from street gangs to clandestine government agencies employ these mad scientists, and give them the resources to do real harm, to cripple a nation, our nation.

Suddenly, my desk phone rings, awoken from my daydream I hasten to answer, and across the line I hear the news. We’ve been compromised. The word is sharp, penetrating, yet numbing; my team failed, and now something has gone terribly awry.

So much of our world is run by an intricate computer known as a programmable controller. It’s a small device that controls big things. It was, coincidentally, this type of computer that was attacked ten years ago in Iran; it was the first time that such a thing occurred, that a malware could so easily do so much damage to the real, physical world. And it was this type of computer that was under attack once more, this time on a boat.

The United States Navy operates eleven aircraft carriers, and each one found itself under attack. However, this is not the type of attack that carriers prepare for, this type of attack came from deep within. The carriers were flooding their holds with water, a very destabilizing experience – and nobody knew why; with so much dependence on computers to do things for us, the captains found themselves unable to switch to a manual control to right the ship, for there is no manual control.

The voice on the other side of the phone demanded that we save the ships. We truly were the only ones in the world who could, soldiers armed with guns are not capable of fighting this kind of enemy, only soldiers armed with bright minds and powerful computers can do such things. Sadly, these ships were far past saving. Every last US carrier sank that day, taking all their men down with them - billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

As expected, my team and I lost our jobs that day. We had let such a disaster slip right past us. Of course, this was not entirely our fault. As our logs showed, there was not a sign of the disaster until after I received the call, it was for this reason we are not in some far off military-funded torture camp.

That is precisely what I find amusing.

I do not wear leather, I have never ridden a Harley, I most certainly have never harmed someone, and I’ve helped the elderly across the street on a number of occasions. I wrote the virus that sank those ships. I carried it to work, plugged it into my computer, and ensured that it slipped past any log and any team member. It’s a curious thing, 1000 lines of code and an ill-intentioned person can do so much harm.

Perhaps the scariest part is that these are weapons of anonymity, for nobody will ever know it was I.

Jacob Wall, 15, is a high school student in Washington state.

God can't help it

Let’s have a quick look at the dusty surface of life:

We choose prison terms as the best response to antisocial behavior, although they don’t work.

We continue capital punishment, but we often kill innocent persons.

We have contempt for Congress but do virtually nothing to reform it.

Christians believe in one God but thousands of churches.

Muslims of competing traditions show little mercy toward each other.

Tolerance, an American ideal that empowered the civil rights movement and rooted out anti-semitic restrictions, dissolved into intolerance of religious customs and holidays.

Equal justice under the law is elusive, because counsel and appeals are not affordable by all.

Underneath that dusty surface is the shiny reality of a world alive in the everlasting present. There is life everywhere. It is being shaped, as a sculpture is shaped, and being reshaped by earthquakes, floods, disease and other strikes of fate.

As my 87th birthday rushes toward me I think maybe it is time to get organized. Can anyone organize all the mistakes? If I made only one a day, that’s 31,755 mistakes. If I made just one humdinger of a mistake every year, even then I’m way over quota. Most of the people I offended have preceded me, as they say, into the next life. I apologize to them wherever they are. My prayer is for mercy, not necessarily justice.

God is merciful. In fairness, God should be merciful toward all who are afflicted with miserable diseases and impulses, and those who are hungry, cold and sad. Life is so huge that a lifetime is not enough to figure it out. God permits speculation on why the infinite love of God surrounds every person, yet gives everybody space to be unloving and hateful if they choose.

The Great Prayer lays it on the line: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others. Some people do this. Some prefer the death penalty, long mandatory prison terms and other love-challenged behavior.

A friend once said that there are no sins—only mistakes. It was a wisecrack rather than a theological declaration, but wisecracks begin wisely.

Confidence in the constant love of God includes an understanding that the Eternal is not concerned with time in the way 87-year-olds are. God is, after all, the instigator of evolution. It took a long time for the Magna Carta to influence the American Bill of Rights. It was a long, stumbling step from the slaughter at Gettysburg to the Civil Rights Act.

In God’s good time it will be seen whether time means a lot or does not mean a lot. The movement of time enables us to grow in mind and spirit, to encounter sin and try to correct it. God can’t help forgiving, can’t help loving, can’t help providing the frosting on everybody’s birthday cake.

A minority sickness seeks attention

Our world spends so much of its energy and talent on wars and prisons that overcoming the numerous destructive diseases gets a low priority. God gave us this beautiful planet, and all we do is squeeze it.

 About the time I was starting kindergarten, President Calvin Coolidge was telling the nation that “the business of America is business.” His term ended in 1929, which one of his successors might have described as a year that will live in business infamy.

 In the years that followed, the disease that placed Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair was overcome. A heart was transplanted, and thousands of transplant surgeries followed. Medical nightmares yielded, slowly, to medical science, and science is just getting started.

 Calvin Coolidge today might say that the business of America is divided between health care and the military. “Civilization and profits,” he once said, “go hand in hand.” Someone else might have said that civilization and prophets go hand in hand.

 Health care has changed as radically as travel. The era of horse manure in the streets has phased into the era of oil spills and global warming, even as penicillin and 21st century microsurgery have extended life. What has not changed is the science of economics, or the will to apply it, from one depression to the next.

 When my neurologist made it official that there was a respectable reason for my dizziness, and that the reason was a first cousin of parkinson’s once removed, called parkinsonism, I became an instant advocate of research to heal olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple systems atrophy (OPCA/MSA).

 This is a minority disease, its victims numbered in the tens of thousands while millions are stricken by cancer or AIDS. Even so, some highly dedicated medical professionals and their equally dedicated lay supporters are searching for a way to treat OPCA/MSA.  There is no cure.

 The disease is so peculiar that it is not easily recognized. My diagnosis was made nearly a decade ago, after more than a year of examinations and tests. That’s not uncommon, nor is the likelihood that the disease was becoming active long before that. Doctors call it progressive. It is on the move, and I began following with a walking stick, then a cane, eventually a rollator and now a power chair.

 At first there was dizziness, which became more vigorous, along with other symptoms. Some of them are especially bemusing. For example, after I write an article I proof it methodically in order to insert dozens of missing a’s. OPCA/MSA has taken custody of the little finger on my left hand.

 It even blacks out wonderful sentences which I haven’t  written yet. Sometimes I begin typing a thoughtful sentence but never finish, because the process of punching keys erases my thoughts before I can write them down. As a reader, you may have noticed that.

 I always have had, and still have, a lot to say. It takes much longer to say it than it did when I was a rewrite man on a Hearst newspaper in a three-paper town. I’ve forgotten what year that was, but one of my assignments was to write about the campaign to nominate Douglas MacArthur for president.

 When my 87th birthday arrives in March I expect to be at this same keyboard, even if it takes longer to punch each key, something like learning to set type by hand in the 1930s.

 God is classier than Calvin Coolidge in describing the nature of civilization and profits. “For what will it profit a man,” asks Christ Jesus, “if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” And the letter of James asks “if a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?”

Eighty-plus years is a quick flick in the timeline of God’s universe. Cures, profits and wonders are alive in that universe, awaiting discovery, even as  evolution awaited discovery. I’ll write more words, but the Word itself goes on and on without a period.

This disease is progressive? So is life

Written for Sharing Magazine

International Order of St. Luke

            If volunteers were awarded medals, my friend and neighbor Joe would have trouble standing up under the weight of them all. He’s a retiree who volunteers for long-term duties with organized charities, while still reaching out to friends and strangers who need help with one thing or another.

            For years Joe has been driving me to my favorite barber shop several miles from where we live. He steers us to restaurants afterward, each one memorable, dozens of them in two counties. As soon as he walks in Joe knows the restaurant staff, and as soon as he sits down he knows diners at the next table. Joe smiles a lot, the way generous people do.

            So, when Joe phoned on Tuesday to offer me a haircut outing I didn’t like turning him down, but another constant companion, dizziness with internal fog, kept me home. After Joe repeated the invitation a couple of times I had to admit that the barbering expeditions are over, and for the same reason that I have a new power chair to accomplish indoors what my power scooter does for me outdoors.

            The ailment neurologists call olivopontocerebellar atrophy, aka multiple system atrophy, is said to be a progressive disease because its mischief enlarges over time. When it began I could still drive a car or go to a movie. With a walker I could still manage a church aisle. After I turned in my car keys on my 81st birthday, I still had a couple of years to shop at the supermarket and watch my grandchildren win trophies with their teams and perform on school stages.

            So far I have not figured out what causes this disease, but neither have the medical specialists. Philosophers and theologians work at it, but so far their results have been sort of Congressional. God makes people, not automatons or puppets. God permits every kind of condition, personality and thought. Prayer brings healing, especially healing of isolation and self consciousness.

            Healing of OPCA/MSA will be sensational, but meanwhile any spiritual triage would suggest that prayer and dedication are also needed elsewhere. Consider that last month alone Chicago recorded 55 homicides, and sanctioned killing on a large scale was reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, here and there around Africa. Cancer, AIDS, accidents and disasters brought death in wholesale lots. There’s plenty to pray about. There’s plenty to do.

             

When E. F. Hutton tried to buy the post office

Edward F. Hutton was one of the wealthiest men of his time, serious in occupation but with a fine sense of humor. One example of that was his invitation to me to visit him and his wife at their home in Palm Beach in the late 1940s.

            By that time he and Marjorie Merriweather Post had divorced, but he was chairman of General Foods and was active in companies he founded, including Wall Street’s E. F. Hutton.

            I was a young labor reporter at the time, and Hutton enjoyed showing me off to his friends as a curiosity, a suspected Democrat whose personal heroes included Eleanor Roosevelt and that crowd.

            When I arrived he apologized for the staffing of his mansion. It was the week of shifting 40 servants from his home in Long Island to his home in Palm Beach, and only a dozen were yet on the job in Florida.

            One who was on the premises was the butler. I was given a four-room suite, which included a direct phone line to New York. In that suite, to my embarrassed horror, I found my suitcase open and empty. I should have known. The butler did it! He had unpacked my clothes, ink stains and all.

            Hutton was solicitous of his untested guest the first day, when he told me that dinner with him and his wife would be informal—just black tie. Inasmuch as he was stripped down to a dozen servants, he may have appreciated my confession that I lacked a black tie and all the fabric that goes with it.

            In fact, Ed Hutton and his wife were considerate hosts who told entertaining stories about life among the very rich while making me quite comfortable. Hutton told me that any yacht brochures I might come across would have been placed by his wife, who was signaling what she’d like to have for a birthday present.

            He told me he had written President Roosevelt, offering to buy the U.S. Post Office from the government and run it as a profitable tax-paying entity. Good management, he said, was needed. FDR did not accept that offer. I remembered it when today’s Postal Service reported financial stress, and proposed further cuts in service.

            Today the mail delivered to my home mailbox included two copies of America magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 19; two copies of Time magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 26; two copies of The Nation dated Sept. 19 and Sept. 26. In a single mail delivery there were three weekly magazines more than a week late.

            Newspapers and magazines will almost inevitably complete a shift from print to online publishing. The mail service, which made it possible for publishers to turn out national periodicals in the first place, still gives identity to small communities all over the country while its own identity fades.