Thoughts On Turning 60

By John McDonnell

Today I turned 60 years old. There are people who would rather ignore a milestone like that, but I’m not one of them. I think it’s worth celebrating when you’ve been on this planet for 60 years, so I embrace my longevity with open arms.

Sixty is a time to stop and think about what went before. I grew up in a time before cell phones, computers, the Internet, iPods and even television (my family didn’t buy our first TV till I was seven years old). It’s a time referred to by my children as the Dark Ages.

When I think back to what life was like in the 1950s it seems like another world. Here are some random thoughts about what it was like for me to grow up 60 years ago.

Playing after school every day, with no need to be home till suppertime. . . playing tag, hide and seek, riding bikes, two-man baseball games (with the strike zone outlined in chalk on the brick wall of the school) using a broomstick and a hollow rubber ball. . . building forts out of branches and anything we found in the woods behind our house. . . swinging on a tire strung up from a high branch on a tree. . . catching grasshoppers and fireflies. . . my father reading the evening newspaper on the porch after dinner. . . the mailman walking his route with a big leather bag, and delivering the mail right to our front door. . . my grandparents spending all afternoon on Saturday visiting, with nothing else to do than just visit and talk. . . dinner at 6:00 every night, with fish on Friday and a roast on Sunday. . . bedtime at 8:00 for the little kids, and 9:00 even in high school. . . no such thing as fast food or pizza. . . saving up our change so we could buy penny candy on vacation. . . no TV watching during the week, but Friday nights were for watching shows on the black and white set in the basement, and eating bowls of ice cream. . . a big black wall phone in the kitchen was the only phone in the house. . . movie theaters that were the size of storefronts, with only one screen. . . Saturday matinees with cartoons and Westerns. . . drive-in movies. . . being taught by nuns who wore heavy black habits with stiff white headpieces even on days when the temperature was in the 90s. . . playing Army with my Dad’s GI helmet and a toy rifle, and dressing up in my Dad’s army uniform on Halloween. . . living in such a solidly Irish Catholic neighborhood that I never actually spoke to a Jew, a Protestant, or an African American till I was in college. . . playing tag at lunch recess, or keepaway. . . trying to scare pheasants in the cornfield near our house, but nervous because people said the farmer would shoot at trespassers with a shotgun filled with salt. . . no seatbelts in cars, and no child seats -- in fact, holding the baby on your lap in the passenger seat. . . my father with the hood up on a Saturday, working on the car. . . being a one-car family. . . my mother sending me on my bike to buy groceries for dinner, and me riding back with the groceries in the basket on the front of my bike. . . watching the 11:00 news on one of only three channels we could get. . . looking up the Church’s rating before we went to see a movie (was it “morally objectionable in part” or worse?). . . having a paper route. . . listening to a tinny transistor radio that faded in and out depending on how you held it. . . playing pickup football, baseball, and basketball games, with no referees and no adults anywhere to interfere. . . the May procession. . . being an altar boy, wearing a high, stiff celluloid collar and starched robes and having to memorize prayers in Latin without knowing what they meant. . . no air conditioning, nothing but a ceiling fan that just blew the hot air around while you sweated in bed. .  a milkman who delivered several times a week early in the morning. . . a bread man. . . a diaper service that  came several times a week. . . a farmer who came once a week and sold meat, eggs, and vegetables from his truck. . . walking to your friends' houses and ringing their doorbells to see if they could come out and play. . . taking piano lessons in the convent with a stern-faced nun sitting next to you on the bench and going over scales endlessly. . . priests shouting from the pulpit, giving fire and brimstone sermons that scared the kids. . . going to a barbershop and getting a crewcut for the summer.

There are lots of these memories, but the thing that strikes me about all of them is that there seemed to be more time back then. More time to spend talking, exploring, wandering around, or just doing nothing. Was it just because I was a child, and time seems to move slower for children? I don’t know if kids today have that same feeling. Most of them seem to be moving pretty fast, and they’ve got the next item on their agenda in mind at every minute during the day. There’s no denying that young people today have a lot more amazing devices in their lives than I had growing up.

I had more time, though.

Dangerous Thoughts

By John McDonnell

What will the world be like when we’re all wearing thought helmets?
Recently I read a report about “thought helmets”, which are devices the U.S. military is developing that will enable soldiers to communicate by sending thoughts to each other. Sensors inside these helmets scan electrical signals from the wearer’s brain and a microprocessor inside the helmet turns the signals into words that are then transmitted to a receiver’s hemet.
You can see how this would be useful in a military situation. Soldiers who are on stealth missions, such as sneaking up on an enemy camp at night, could communicate without making a sound. A soldier could direct his mates to avoid obstacles, spread out, get ready to attack, or any number of other messages, all at the speed of thought.
Things will really get interesting when these helmets are developed for consumer use -- and you know that will happen eventually.
Can you imagine a football team all communicating instantly about every play on the field? Or people at a business meeting exchanging thousands of thoughts an hour? Or the potential for fun at a party? It will bring a new dimension to social interaction.
Then again, what is communication going to be like when you can communicate at the speed of thought?
Most of us have a filter between our brain and our mouth, so that we don’t say everything that comes to mind. What happens when the filter is tossed aside? If you can think something and communicate it instantaneously, I can see problems. If we don’t have a chance to edit what we’re thinking, there could be some nasty arguments caused by those thought helmets.
Here are some classic cases where we don’t say the first thing we think, and imagine what would happen if you did.
Reporter to football coach: “How do you feel about losing 72 to 0?”
Reporter to player: “Is there anything you’d like to say to those people who booed you today?”
Boss to salesman: “Your sales results are down. It’s not because we raised our prices, right?”
Restaurant patron to waitress: “You expect a tip for this service?”
Used car salesman to customer: “Would you believe me if I told you this vehicle was hardly ever used?  
Parent to teacher: “Isn’t my Johnny the smartest student you ever had?”
Wife to husband: “Do these pants make my butt look too big?”
On reflection, maybe these thought helmets should be kept away from the public, like nuclear weapons. The potential for catastrophe is too great.

It's Going To Be All Right

By John McDonnell

My daughter is graduating from college in a few days. She’s happy, of course, but also a little scared at the prospect of going out in the world and starting a career.
My words of wisdom to her? “It’s going to be all right.”
Maybe that’s not the most profound statement a father can make, but I still think it’s valuable.
In fact, it’s a constant thread running through my role as a parent. It’s a phrase I told my daughter when she was a little girl and fell and bruised her knee. It’s a phrase I used when she came home disappointed because she got a failing grade in a test. It’s a phrase I used when she had a bad game as a college soccer player. It’s a phrase I used just last month when she called about something that went wrong in her internship.
Even though she’s 22 and a grown woman, she still seems comforted when I say, “It’s going to be all right.”
I believe in positive thinking, and that your words can change things. They can certainly change your mood, your outlook on life, and that can make all the difference. I don’t always know that things are going to turn out all right, but I believe that if you say that phrase often enough it will create a positive outcome.
I also believe that it’s one of a parent’s chief jobs to say, “It’s going to be all right.” After all, there are plenty of people in the world who are ready to tell you that things aren’t going to turn out all right. Read the headlines in any newspaper, and you’ll see enough gloom and doom to make you think the world is heading downhill fast, and nothing, but nothing, is going to turn out right. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do in the face of all that is to say, “It’s going to turn out all right.”
If you can say that phrase to your child their whole life, and they believe you, and it helps them to keep a positive attitude about their life, I think you’ve done a pretty good job as a parent.
THE END

A rainbow for Mother's Day

I can't think of a better Mother's Day present than this. Last night we took the family out to dinner, and we saw a rainbow. The amazing thing is that we went to dinner at that very same restaurant almost a year ago and saw a rainbow that night also.
The last time we went it was for my wife's birthday; this time was for Mother's Day. Both times there were some showers just before we got to the restaurant.
And then we saw the rainbow.
Rainbows are such magical things, and I always think that they are an omen of good fortune. So what does it mean when you see two rainbows a year apart at the same place? It must mean we are going to have some amazing things happen to us.
I think it was about the best Mother's Day present anyone could ask for, and my wife agrees.

My Bank Rant

A long time ago in another universe I worked in a bank. It was a small town bank with half a dozen offices, and my grandfather had helped to start it with some local businesspeople in the 1920s.
I only spent two years at that job, but I learned some lessons I’ll never forget.
The biggest one was: Treat your customers like friends. Everybody from the president down to the tellers at that bank knew their customers like they were part of the family. The branch manager knew if the gas station on the corner was out of Pepsi in its vending machines. They knew whether the plumbing supply store was meeting its payroll. What the local real estate market was like. Who was going to expand their business. What type of cars were selling well at the car dealer’s lot. The owners of businesses would come in and sit down at the manager’s desk and chat with him all day long. The tellers would gossip with every customer, and they often knew things that weren’t in the local newspaper. The loan officers in the main office would go golfing with their business customers, or take them out to lunch, and they always remembered a birthday or an important event in some customer’s life.
I was thinking about that recently when I went to my local bank, which has just been taken over by Wells Fargo, because I ran out of checks and needed some temporary checks to tide me over till I my new order came in.
“Sorry, Mr. McDonnell,” the teller said. “There’s now a charge for temporary checks.”
I was flabbergasted. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “There was never a charge for temporary checks.”
“Sorry, it’s a new policy,” she said, without the slightest note of apology in her voice.
That’s not the only new policy, either. I found to my dismay that if I temporarily overdraw my checking account, and Wells Fargo has to cover the overdraft with money from my money market account, they hit me with a fee for that. My previous bank, Wachovia, would do that little transaction for free.
Banks everywhere are tacking on more fees. Those ATM fees that were a minor inconvenience when banks started charging them a few years ago are rising steadily, till it’s now $3 and above for me to use an ATM machine that is not in my bank’s network.
At this rate I’m expecting the day when I’ll have to pay a fee just to walk into one of the bank’s branches. They’ll have a toll collector at the door, or maybe just a machine where you have to swipe a card to get in.
There were none of these fees when I worked in banking. In fact, when I was an assistant branch manager one of my jobs was to settle the checking accounts of old ladies who would come in all flustered because they bounced a check or two, and they’d dump a pile of bank statements on my desk and say, “Can you please help me, young man? I just don’t know how I got in this mess.” It would sometimes take me hours before I could sort out the problem, but we never charged a nickel for it. Imagine a bank doing that today.
We had customers back then who still had their first savings account book, and some of them dated back to the 1920s. They stayed loyal to us because we treated them with kindness, we remembered their names and took an interest in their lives, and we didn’t try to nickel and dime them with fees for every little transaction we performed for them.
I know the world has changed, but it hasn’t changed that much that people don’t care how you treat them when they do business with you. I’m sure Wells Fargo can give me lots of reasons why it’s essential for them to charge fees for things that banks used to do for free, and if the market will bear it then they’re welcome to do it.
But I’m also welcome to take my business elsewhere. I know I won’t find a bank anymore like that small town bank I used to work at, but maybe there’s one that will be just a little more concerned, a little more personal, and a little less prone to stick its hands in my wallet.

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Thoughts On Osama's Demise

So we got Osama. I had almost forgotten about him; he had faded into irrelevance.

Almost.

When I drove to New York last summer and the skyline came into view across the river, there was that emptiness where the Twin Towers used to be. At times like that, or when the anniversary of 9/11 comes around each year, that's when it all comes crashing back. I remember the pain, the horror, the desire for vengeance against this man who killed so many innocent people on that cloudless, brilliant day in September.

In the beginning I thought we'd get him fast. There was so much anger, so many people seemed willing to work around the clock to track him down, I thought they'd get him before Christmas. I expected he'd be shot dead in a firefight in some Afghan valley, probably running for his life from the soldiers bearing down on him.

It didn't happen. Now, with the revelation that he was hiding out less than an hour's drive from the capital of Pakistan, in a town where many retired Pakistani generals live, it seems likely that he got help from people in high places. I won't be surprised if the computer files that were taken from his house have the names of high-ranking Pakistani officials on them. Somebody had to be protecting this man, whether because of ideology or payoffs, for him to avoid capture this long.

My religion tells me it's not right to rejoice in the death of anyone, even someone as evil as Osama bin Laden, so I didn't go out and celebrate when I heard the news. I was somber, thinking of all the families that were shattered by the deaths of loved ones on that September day. I thought of how our innocence was lost as a country, symbolized for me by the way my children acted when I picked them up from school that day. They ran out to the car and they kept looking up, afraid that a jet plane would fall out of the sky on them.

I thought of the people who have been working relentlessly for ten years to track down bin Laden and all of his cohorts, to bring a measure of justice to the victims of terror everywhere.

And I thought: Job well done. The mission is not finished, but still, job well done.

 

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Maybe I Did Something Right

Parenting can be an exercise in trashing yourself. I've never done anything else in my life where I second-guess myself as much as parenting. From the time my children were babies I've always had a nagging voice in my head saying, "Maybe I should have done this or that differently." It's everything from, "Maybe I should have made sure they didn't use a pacifier when they were babies," to "Maybe I should have insisted they go to a different college."

The "Maybe I should have" moments pile up with each year, till you could spend hours analyzing decisions you made when they were six years old and wondering if you screwed them up forever because of that. You lay awake at night and think, "Is he going to get diabetes some day because I let him eat all the chocolate candy he wanted when he was five years old?" Okay, I'm exaggerating -- but not by much.

That's why it's such a pleasure when you have a moment when things go right, when you can bask in the glory of a decision well made. Last night my wife and I attended a voice recital at my daughter's high school, and she sang a solo. She's 16, and this is her fifth recital since she started at the school. She is a beautiful child, but shy. There's nothing wrong with shyness -- I was very shy as a child -- but as a parent you want to see your children grow out of it and let their voice be heard as they enter adulthood. This daughter has always enjoyed singing, but she was afraid to get up and do it in front of an audience. When she went to the same high school as her older sister, we strongly suggested that she sign up for voice lessons, the same as her more extroverted older sister. She did what we asked, but when it came to recital time she was clearly nervous on stage, and her voice had no volume. "I don't know how to relax and sing," she told us after another performance where her voice sounded small and timid.

Well, last night it all changed. As we sat in amazement in the theater, she strode up to the microphone, sat down at a stool, and sang with power and spirit. Her solo was beautiful, moving, and loud -- and it brought tears to our eyes. I tried to shoot a video with my camera, but I couldn't focus because my eyes were wet and my hand was shaking too much.

I can't take full credit for this, because one thing I've learned is that children can amaze you. You raise them from babies and you think you know everything about them, then they do something that you wouldn't have predicted in a million years. I do take credit for putting her in a position to astound us with her voice. If my wife and I had not urged her to sign up for the voice program she may never have done it on her own.

So, I'm patting myself on the back. Anytime I can say, "I'm glad I did this," rather than, "Maybe I should have," it's a good day.

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Doubting John

Yesterday’s Gospel reading was one of my favorites; the passage about Doubting Thomas. I like the story about Thomas because I can identify with him.
I mean, we all have doubts, right? It's surprising that there was only one doubter like Thomas among the apostles. If you believe the Gospel accounts, the apostles really didn't have a clue about what Jesus was doing. They sometimes seem like a bunch of blockheads who had no idea that their leader had to die and rise again to fulfill His mission on earth. Thomas's reaction on hearing the story that Jesus had appeared among the apostles was a perfectly natural one. I can easily imagine myself reacting the same way.
The priest's sermon on this topic was very muddled and confused, however. I think he was trying to make the point that if you have doubts like Thomas you should do something about them. He told about a man he knows who's had the same doubts about the accuracy of the Gospel translations for 27 years. He said this person was intellectually lazy, and that he should have cleared up his doubts a long time ago. He ended the sermon by challenging the congregation with this phrase, "What would it take for you to overcome your doubts?"
And then he walked off the pulpit and continued with the liturgy.
I guess this was supposed to be a real boffo ending, a dramatic way to end the homily.
It just left me confused.
I agree that it’s better to address doubt than to simply live with it. The thing is, what if the only way to resolve your doubt about Jesus rising from the dead is to see him just like Thomas did? What if that’s the only thing that will satisfy you? Reading a book or having a debate or watching a documentary on TV won’t do it. You really want the ultimate proof: to see Him in the flesh.
Thomas got to see Jesus in the flesh, and touch his wounds. That was a real effective way to clear up his doubt. But as far as I know, not too many people since then have been in the position of Thomas. In Science, doubt is resolved by proof, and proof has  some pretty stringent requirements. It has to be measurable, and falsifiable, to name two. In an age when doubts and conspiracy theories abound, when miracles are routinely explained away through scientific theory, skepticism is a part of everyone’s mindset. Seeing Jesus in the flesh would clear up my doubts, but that's not something I have much control over.
I really think the priest was trying to throw the whole doubt issue back on the congregation, and make it seem like it was our fault if we had doubts and that we needed to do something to clear them up. It was one of those sermons where I wanted to say, "Wait a minute, don't leave so soon. We need to talk about this. I’m not sure I agree with what you’re saying.”
I guess I'm just a Doubting John.

Facebook Facts

Sometimes I want to be anonymous.

I don't want to be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, or

Twitter.

I don't want that guy I never liked in high school

Sending me a friend request.

I don't want that woman I worked with when I was 23,

Who probably remembers the times I screwed up in work,

And that I got fired;

I definitely don't want her as part of my

Network.

There's a reason I moved on with my life,

And didn't stay in touch with some of these people.

I thought I was done with them

Forever,

But now they're looking me up on social networks.

Friending me.

How can I turn them down?

What should I say?

"Sorry, I never really liked you

In high school, because

You gave me that embarrassing nickname that I hated."

Or, "Sorry, you must have forgotten that I had a

Shouting match with you in the office

Twenty years ago,

And I always suspected you got me

Fired.

So, no thanks, I don't want to be your friend now."

I'd rather present a different face to the world,

And list my many accomplishments, triumphs, and

Awards (even if I'm a little hazy about some of them).

I'm looking for a different network;

I'm looking for a different me.

I'd rather not chat about old times,

Because it's old times I'm trying to forget.

Didn't you see my profile picture?

I'm more distinguished now,

Somehow more, oh, professional.

That person you want to connect to

Is in a different network.

The stuck-in-a-time-warp network.

I'm not part of that anymore.

I hope.

No Tornadoes Here

I have moved around a bit in my life, but I still live less than an hour's drive from the town where I spent my childhood. This used to bother me, because I thought that it meant I had no spirit of adventure.

I should have moved far away, I told myself. I should be living in Europe, or Asia, or at least in California, instead of staying so close to my roots. How boring, how unimaginative. How safe.

Yes, but safety is not always a bad thing. When I look at news reports of the tornadoes that roared through the South in the last few weeks, and I see the pictures of flattened houses, smashed cars, and mobile homes that were lifted up and deposited miles away, I think maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to stay close to home.

I live in the northeast part of the U.S., a place that doesn't get extreme weather or natural disasters. We don't get tsunamis, earthquakes, or mudslides here. We get some bad thunderstorms, but we're far enough from the ocean that hurricanes have lost their punch by the time they reach us. What we call a tornado would be nothing more than a slight breeze to someone from Alabama or Oklahoma. If the temperature hits 100 degrees two days in a row during the summer the newspapers tell everyone to stay indoors during the "heat wave", but I've been to South Carolina and Florida in July and that's killer heat. As for snowstorms, well, we've had some big ones in recent years, but even the biggest accumulation of snow melts in a week or two, which is better than places where the front lawn disappears under a carpet of snow from October to May.

For anyone who loves extreme weather, yes, this is a boring place to live. You won't ever have to run for your life from a huge wave or a monster tornado. There are no volcanoes waiting to spew hot ash and lava in your backyard while you sleep. Then again, when I look at YouTube videos of some of these events I realize that I'm fine with boring. I'm okay with unimaginative.

Safe is not such a bad thing.  

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Passing The Test

Today my daughter takes her driver's test. This is the third time I've taught one of my children to drive, and my last one will be coming along in a few years. At times like this I reflect on how simple Life was when they were small children, and how stupid I was not to realize that parenting was easy back then.

When my children were small I spent way too much time worrying about them. The things I worried about seem so ridiculous now. Whether they would fall off their bike and skin their knee. Whether they'd catch a cold if they were around another child who was sick. Whether they would get their feelings hurt if they weren't invited to a sleepover. I look back at those days and think, Was I crazy? Why was I losing sleep over that? There are way more important things to worry about when your children get bigger.

For at least the first year after every one of my children gets a driver's license my heart pounds whenever they go out in the car. I think about them constantly, and if they're not home exactly on time I break out into a sweat. If they're ten minutes late I start pacing the floor and trying to call them on the cell phone. If they don't answer my heart starts racing, although I'm also hoping it's because I told them not to talk on their cell phone while driving. When they get home I cross-examine them to find out what happened, and when I'm sure everything is okay my body goes limp.

Big kids mean bigger problems. Every time they leave the house you imagine what kind of trouble they could get into. It's complicated by the fact that as a parent you realize you're supposed to be giving them more freedom, because the teenage years are when children are learning how to run their own lives. When they were little I didn't have to fool around with this, "Let me live my own life" stuff. I was in charge -- end of story.

Parents always try to shield children from making a mistake. When they're little you make sure they fasten their seatbelts, don't drink Pepsi before bedtime, and look both ways before crossing the street. Those instincts don't go away when they get older. Every parent would secretly like to keep making decisions for their children even when they grow up. Don't drive that fast, don't go to that party, don't go to that college, don't marry that person -- I could hear myself saying all those things. I have to back off, though, and realize that it would be a sad situation if my children were still taking orders from me when they're 30.

That doesn't make it any easier, though, when they come back from the driver's exam with that big smile on their faces and say, "I passed! When can I have the car?"

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

College Admissions Madness

Big sigh of relief today. My daughter in high school got her scores back from the ACT test she took in March, and they look good enough to get her into the college she likes.
This is my third experience as a parent with the college admissions process, and it seems to get more stressful all the time. When my older kids were applying to colleges, I remember their school counselors saying that they were unlucky enough to be born during a mini Baby Boom in the late 1980s, and that meant there was more competition when their generation reached college age. The counselors said that when this demographic bump passed through the educational system it would not be as competitive for the next group of kids.
I don't know what happened to that idea. Every college I research seems to have raised its academic standards and lowered its acceptance rate. It seems harder than ever to get into one of the elite colleges. I talked to a parent recently who told me his son was president of his class, scored over 1500 on the Math/Verbal sections of the SAT, was a starting left tackle on a state championship football team, did hundreds of hours of service work during high school, and still got rejected by the college he wanted to go to.
It's madness, and it's contributing to some very stressful times for a lot of young people. When I was a high school junior many years ago, my father told me my college choices were limited to the schools I could commute to, because we couldn't afford room and board costs. I don't remember perusing any lists of "50 Best Colleges" and agonizing over my SAT scores. In fact, I only took the SAT test once, and only applied to one college. I got my acceptance letter and didn't spend one more minute worrying about whether I was going to a good college or not.
There are a lot of good colleges out there, even if they're not on the "50 Best" lists. The important thing is to get a degree and then go out and live your life to the fullest. I've worked with people who went to Ivy League colleges and made a mess of their lives, and I've also worked with people who went to community colleges and were a success in every sense of the word.
When I get too caught up in this college admissions craziness, I have to step back, take a deep breath, and tell myself that college is just a waystation on the journey through life. What the station looks like is not as important as where you go once you leave it.
John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

My Desk Is A Work Of Art

I don't understand people who are neat. I know they exist, but they are like some exotic form of life, like bacteria that live under the ocean at steam vents, or deep underground in Antarctica. How do people like this stay organized? How do they keep their desk clean? How can they keep track of all the paper in their life? My desk attracts paper like a magnet attracts iron. Every once in awhile I bring out the trash bags and start tossing paper in them, or putting the important papers in file folders, and for a brief moment of time my desk becomes clean and neat.

It never lasts. Little piles of paper start to accumulate, and before I know it my desk looks like the aftermath of some natural disaster. A neat desk intimidates me. I have had bosses who kept a neat desk, making sure that there were no loose papers on their desk each night before they left work. I was afraid of them. I recognized in them a ruthlessness, a willingness to cut ties without remorse, that I do not have. After all, who knows what stray piece of paper may come in handy sometime in the future? Parting with a receipt, a memo, a document of any kind is hard for me, because I never know when I might need it again. People who can throw documents away with reckless abandon are much too confident, too self-assured, too domineering for me. They must assume that if they get rid of a document and they need it again, someone else will make them a copy. The world will rearrange itself to do their bidding, in other words.

Not me. I assume that every piece of paper holds the key to my eternal happiness, and that if I lose it I will be condemned to an eternity of fire and brimstone. That's why I let these things pile up in my life, and why it is agony to let go of them.

Isn't there a famous quote about a messy desk being the sign of a creative mind? Maybe that's why I like those piles of papers stacked everywhere, why I don't mind sorting through them several times a day to find something, why I can live with the inefficiency and disorganization. I'm creative; that's it.

Maybe I should look at my desk as a piece of modern art.

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Sins Of The Fathers

It seems to be the fashion lately for children of famous male authors to write tell-all books about how mean and nasty their fathers were. The newest one is "Reading My Father: A Memoir", by Alexandra Styron. In it she reveals that her father, William Styron, was an ogre, a verbally abusive bully who drank too much and may have cheated on his wife. The fact that famous authors are sometimes unpleasant to their families is not news. However, Alexandra Styron's book seems to be part of a trend. In the last decade there have been books by the children of John Cheever, James Dickey, and J.D. Salinger, telling stories of their parents' nasty behavior at home. 

What's up with this rash of tell-all books? Is there something different about this generation of American novelists that made them so unpleasant to their loved ones? The "abusive" tag is what interests me the most, because I have often thought that what young people today call "abusive" is a far cry from what that word meant years ago. I grew up with a father who would be called verbally abusive by today's standards. He yelled when he was angry, and many things made him angry. He was not shy about telling the people around him when they did something wrong, in picturesque language. He was liable to explode without warning. Alexandra Styron tells about how her father flew into a rage when her mother burned the dinner. I remember a similar scene in my house, and it was not pretty.

But so what? The world was different 40 years ago. The men of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" had quick tempers, some of them, and maybe it was because of the world they grew up in. They had to deal with the worst economic depression in our country's history, two World Wars, and the threat of the atomic bomb hanging over them. They were under a lot of pressure, and at times they released that pressure by yelling at the people around them.

We survived, and most of us learned not to act that way around our loved ones. I rarely ever raise my voice to my children, and I'm proud of that, but the unintended consequence of that is they can't tolerate criticism as well as I can. If I mention some little area in their lives where they're falling short, if I raise my voice just a half tone, they tell me I'm yelling. "Yelling?" I say. "That's not yelling. You don't know what yelling is, believe me."

What's "abusive" for one generation is not for the next. Definitions can change based on circumstances. My father probably thought he was using kid gloves in raising his children. From the stories I remember about his own childhood, with a father who was prone to using a strap on his sons when they brought home a failing grade in school, he most definitely was a kinder, gentler Dad to me.

I'm sorry if Alexandra Styron has so many bad memories of her father, but I'm sure she'll survive.

I'm also sure she feels she's raising her children in a kind, loving, non-abusive manner. It remains to be seen if they'll look at it the same way when it comes time for them to write their own memoir.

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Easter: A Time Of Renewal

After a typical Philadelphia Spring with weeks of cold, cloudy, wet weather, I woke up this morning to see the sun streaming through my bedroom window. Somehow this happens every year around here: the cold, gray weather breaks on Easter Sunday and we have brilliant sunshine, the flowers bloom overnight, and the deep green of the trees and lawns pops out from the background of blue sky.

Something special always seems to happen around Easter. I got engaged on Easter Sunday, asking my wife to marry me on a glorious morning after Mass, in a park with azaleas blooming everywhere. Several years later we found out just before Easter that we were going to have our first child. Today I got a phone call from my nephew that his wife is pregnant with their first child.

It is a time of renewal, rebirth, hope. There are new possibilities afoot. Springtime brings hope -- yes, for folks like me it brings allergies also, but let's focus on the hope.

I am brimming with confidence about the future. I want to write books that are full of hope, passion, renewal. I have grand plans today, I am dreaming great dreams.

And why not? When the Lord has risen, anything is possible.

John McDonnell's Smashwords page

Road Trip

By John McDonnell

Okay, I'm going on a road trip this week with my daughter, and I'm going to post diary entries here. We're visiting colleges so she can get an idea of what schools she might want to apply to next Fall. She's a high school junior, and we've only visited three schools so far, so this is where Dad clears the decks and spends some bonding time with daughter, while we drive around the South and look at schools.

This is so different than when I was thinking about college, so many years ago. I basically looked at one school, LaSalle College (now it's a university, but back then it was just a punk college). I never visited it; I just looked at some brochures that came in the mail, and said, "Okay, this place looks good, I'll apply there." I took the SAT test one time, racked up a pretty decent score, sent in my one college application, and got my acceptance early in my senior year. I never took an SAT prep course, never spent a minute researching schools, and -- thank God -- didn't know what was an elite school and what wasn't.

This was in the innocent days before the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, before the mania to get in the "right" school, and before parents got so deeply involved with the whole college admissions process. All my folks cared about was that I went to a college that was local and not too expensive. No, I'm wrong: all they really cared about was that I got a college degree. My father was the first person in his family to get a college degree, and he was determined that all of his children would get one too. He didn't give a hoot about "top 50" colleges, or anything like that. He just wanted that degree for his kids, so they could get a good start toward making something of themselves.

Today, it's all so complicated. I think that's sad for the kids, because it takes some of the joy out of the experience. They get so bogged down in getting the right grades, compiling a list of activities to put on their resume, and making sure they get all the right recommendations, that they can't relax and enjoy the experience of finding a college that's right for them.

Well, that's enough pontificating. For the rest of this week I'm going to try to make this a fun, joyful experience for my daughter. Hopefully I'll succeed. I'll post about it here.

I Remember Bennie Briscoe

By John McDonnell

Last week I thought of Bennie Briscoe, and I typed his name in Google and found out that he died on December 28 2010. Most people today don't know who Bennie Briscoe was, but there was a time when he was considered the second-best middleweight boxer in the world. He was a bald Black man who fought with a furious intensity, and he is still considered one of the hardest punchers to ever ply that vicious sport. Bennie never took a step backward in the ring, and boxers knew they were in for a war when they signed to fight him.

Bennie was born in Georgia, and he moved north to Philly when he was a teenager. He got involved with boxing in the glory years of the sport in Philly, when there were champions and contenders in every gym, and they all had colorful nicknames, like "Kitten" Hayward, "Boogaloo" Watts, and "Gypsy Joe" Harris to name a few.

Bennie, though, didn't have a colorful nickname. He was simply known as "Bad" Bennie Briscoe, probably because bad is what his opponents felt when he got finished with them.

He was a feared presence in the sport, and because of that it's said that champions avoided him. He only got three World Title fights in a twenty year career, and he lost them all (once on a controversial call).

The funny thing about Bennie was that he was more revered in some ways in Philly than the guys who actually won championships. He was our town's everyday warrior, the guy you'd see on the subway going to work at his job in the Streets Department. Bennie worked 40 years in the Streets Department, and trained for his biggest fights while hoisting trash cans every day. He rarely missed work, and sent most of his boxing winnings home to his mother in Georgia. He was a fearsome boxer, but he carried a lunch box every day.

To me he epitomizes the Philadelphia I grew up in. It was a town full of lovable losers. The sports teams almost never won their respective championships. With the exception of the 1968 76ers and the Flyers of 1974 and 75, the Philly sports teams usually finished far back in the pack each year, with second place the best we could hope for.

Even when a championship was in reach, something always happened to the Philly teams to snatch it away from them. The 1964 Phillies infamously lost 10 games straight at the end of the season, just when they seemed a lock to make it to the World Series.

That's the world I grew up in.

Philly was always an also-ran, always behind New York and Washington in everything, and we always had an inferiority complex about it. It was a town of Bennie Briscoes, people who worked hard and had talent but just never seemed to get over the hump to be the best in their field.

That's why it's so amazing to see what's happened in recent years. Philadelphia is routinely written up in national magazines for its beauty, its charming neighborhoods, its restaurants, and yes, its sports teams. The Phillies won the World Series several years ago, and they have won four straight NL East Division championships. They are rated one of the best teams in baseball every year. And this year during the offseason the unthinkable happened, at least for someone from my generation -- a high-priced player, Cliff Lee, one of the best pitchers in the sport, turned down an offer from the New York Yankees in order to sign with the Phillies.

This was amazing. A superstar chose Philadelphia over New York? It seemed almost too good to be true, for someone from my era. And now the Phillies have what many people think could be one of the best pitching staffs in history. Las Vegas oddsmakers are betting they'll get back to the World Series again.

Philly has come a long way from the Bennie Briscoe days. We always had people like Bennie, the warriors, the good men who did their jobs every day and did them with skill and passion. Now, though, the town has a spring to its step, and a feeling of confidence that yes, we can win it all, we can get to the top of the mountain.

I'm glad Bennie got to see that before he died.

THE END

Hello I Must Be Going, Watson

By John McDonnell

Okay, so IBM’s Watson computer can win at “Jeopardy”. Can it understand a Groucho Marx joke?

The news came out in mid-February that Watson, a computer built by IBM, beat two former champions at the game of “Jeopardy”. Beat them soundly, too.

I thought it was amusing when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990s, because I thought it was nothing more than a parlor trick. It’s just raw computing power, I told myself. Computers will never be more than glorified adding machines. 

However, Watson has me worried. That's because this computer was specially built to do "natural language processing", which meant it had to analyze “Jeopardy” questions by sifting through a vast database of knowledge (encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, etc.) in microseconds, make hundreds of decisions in the blink of an eye, and then come up with what it decided was the correct answer.

I can accept that computers can do math a million times better than me. I'm not threatened by that at all. But when they start coming onto my turf, which is words and their meanings, then I get a little nervous. I'm a writer, and I have been one all my life. I've always had a certain skill at putting words together, and it's served me well both in school and in my profession.

I know that over the course of the last 30 years computers have proven to be better at humans in many things, and they have made major changes in industries and professions because of that.

But words? I thought I was safe from computer penetration of my field, simply because computers couldn't understand the nuances of words the way humans can. A human expression like, "It's raining cats and dogs," can completely flummox a computer, because the machines are so literal. Or, how about a Groucho Marx joke like, “I wanted to get a boat with a flat bottom, but the girl at the boathouse didn’t have one.” How can a computer understand the joke in that line?

For the “Jeopardy” challenge, IBM had to find a way to enable Watson to analyze expressions, decide between different meanings of a word, and take all sorts of gray areas into account that you don't have with a mathematics problem. Apparently, they succeeded. IBM announced that it is entering into a partnership with Nuance, a company that makes speech recognition software, to adapt its technology for commercial use in the near future.

What does this mean for my profession? One thing I can see is that it won't be long before writers will have the kind of software that musicians use to correct imperfections in a vocal performance. In other words, your word processing program will have a way to convert a clunky turn of phrase into something more clear, with more style and grace. The software will analyze a pedestrian turn of phrase and offer options for making it better. "Perhaps this metaphor will work better," it might say. "Here is a quote from Shakespeare that will express your point better." Or, "this section should be shorter; these words should be eliminated."

Not long after that I can see a program that will write articles, books, yes even fiction and poetry, and all you have to do is type in a few keywords. As the technology gets more sophisticated, you could have computers producing great literature just as now they make breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics and science.

And then what? Will there be a time when people prefer computer writers over human ones? If a computer can write a best-selling detective novel or romance for a publisher, and the publisher doesn't have to pay royalties or deal with eccentric writers, I think publishers will jump at that arrangement. Why not?

And then guys like me will be among the millions of writers who have been replaced by a computer. They'll be hawking their wares on street corners, trying to get somebody to buy their novels or poems even though people will have programs on their laptops that can produce better writing for free, and in a matter of minutes.

There’s an expression that everyone thinks they have a novel in them. What will happen to them when the Watsons of the world can do it better? Will they become bitter? Will they destroy their computers? Will they form underground cults and seek to overthrow the computer companies and send us back to the Dark Ages when people still wrote literature?

It's not fair, I tell you. Somebody better stop this before it gets serious.

THE END

Goodbye To A Priest

Father Hanley was a priest who taught me in high school, and I hadn't seen him in a long time. In fact, I hadn't even thought of him in years, although when I got the email invitation to his memorial Mass, a flood of memories came back to me.

High school for me was awhile ago, and I'm reminded of that when I run into my classmates at reunions. They have gray hair and they talk about the 1950s and 60s with a great deal of familiarity. We all have vivid memories of JFK's assassination, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, miniskirts, Woodstock, the moon landing, etc.

I share all those memories with my classmates, but I also have something most of them don't have, even the ones on their second marriages -- a 13 year old daughter. I got married late and had children even later, so while some of my classmates have grandchildren, I still have teenagers.

At my last reunion a couple of guys mentioned they were already retired and had moved to South Carolina. I said, "I have a kid who's not even in high school yet. That retirement place on the beach is a long way off for me."

When Father Hanley died I realized that he was probably the last surviving teacher I had in high school. The little Catholic high school where I went has a cemetery in a field out back, and most of the priests who taught me are buried there. About ten years ago, on a visit to the school, I took a walk through the cemetery and read the headstones. When I saw the birth dates I realized that most of them were only in their 30s and 40s when they taught me, and now I’m older than that.

I wanted to go to Father Hanley's Mass, and I marked it on my calendar. I envisioned myself going back to the little chapel where I attended Mass in high school, seeing some of my classmates, perhaps walking through that cemetery again. I would revel in the memories, thinking back to the good and bad of high school.

The tough guy poses we struck, the machismo that was as thin as a haze of cigarette smoke. Talking about girls. Playing basketball in a gym that throbbed with teenage hormones. Thinking about girls. Wondering how my life was going to turn out. The cutting humor that teenage boys have, where everything was unprintable but so funny it made your sides hurt from laughing. Thinking about girls. Talking about life, morals, religion, sports, and a million other things with the priests during and after class, with blazing honesty. 

I went to a Catholic grade school and was taught by nuns. Eight years of stern-faced women in black habits made me feel like a prisoner by the time I was 13. When I got to the all-boys high school it was a relief to have male teachers. They didn't mince words, they didn't wheedle or scold you the way the nuns did. Some of them had served in World War II or the Korean War, and they had the grit of life on them. They told it to you straight, and we boys were grateful for that. They didn't take any nonsense, but at the same time they had a kindness you could sense under the gruff exterior. They cared about us, and we knew it.

Father Hanley taught a religion class. I don't remember the specifics of what he taught me, but I do remember a lot of passionate discussions in class. I remember talking about real world situations, challenges we faced every day, and how to handle them. It wasn't a pie-in-the-sky philosophy, or the rote memorization we had in grade school with the nuns, but a nuts and bolts discussion about real life morals.

There was a lot going on in the world. The Civil Rights movement. The Vietnam War. The hippie movement. Old values were being questioned, and people were anxious for change. Father Hanley and his peers didn’t shy away from those tough questions, and they taught us how to look at them honestly and try to find the moral path amid all that turmoil.

I realized the night before Father Hanley's Mass that I couldn't go. My wife was out of town visiting our son in college, and I had two teenagers to look after, with a full schedule of activities the next day. It was impossible to do it all and still drive 25 miles to get to my high school in time for the Mass.

So, I had to say a silent prayer for Father Hanley, and hope that he's in Heaven now. I wish I had gotten to see him at some point in the last 40 years and thanked him for what he did for me. I'm sure he didn't get nearly enough thanks from the thousands of students he taught in a long teaching career. He was one of many priests who taught me, men who gave up the comforts of family life to teach other people’s children, who lived in a community and had no salary, no house or car to call their own.

People like him, who don't have children of their own, have to live on in the lives of the people they taught. I know that he influenced me in profound ways, and he did that with thousands of other men. All those discussions about what's important in life sunk deep into us, and helped to mold our later lives. I would not be the person I am today without the Father Hanleys of the world.

Many thanks, Father. May you rest in peace.

Does Birth Order Matter?

By John McDonnell

I never believed that birth order plays a role in a person's life, until I became a parent. As much as parents try to deny it, we do treat each child differently. Sometimes that’s because they have different personalities, but it also has something to do with birth order.

Parents change over time, and that’s the main reason birth order is important. You just don’t raise your youngest child the way you did your oldest, especially if there’s a big gap between them. I’m not saying that the oldest children get the best parenting, or that the youngest do. It’s just different, and here’s why.

. The first time is a charm. The first time you experience anything as a parent is always a small miracle. Hearing your baby cry for the first time. Watching them take their first steps, say their first words. It doesn't matter how inane or stupid, the first time your kid does something it’s the most amazing event in the universe. This is not to say that it's less amazing when your other children have the same experiences. A miracle is still a miracle the second time, but it just doesn’t have that same slap-in-the-face freshness to it.

. You take more pictures in the beginning. There is no clearer way to analyze the birth order question than to add up how many pictures and videos parents have of each of their kids. In most families, the number of images is inversely proportional to the birth order. When my mother cleaned out her house before moving into a retirement home, she presented each of her children with envelopes full of childhood photographs. For me, the oldest of six, there were several manila envelopes bulging with photos, some that were glossy studio portraits. My youngest sibling got one letter-size envelope with a handful of Polaroids in it, and no studio shots.

. You start out with more energy. I used to wonder why my Dad only played catch in the backyard with me as a little boy, and didn't do it with any of my brothers. Now I know. When my oldest daughter and son were young I'd often play basketball with them in the driveway. Now, I look at the basketball net wistfully, and remember the days before back pain. If I ever went out in the driveway and challenged my youngest daughter to a game of hoops she'd probably tell me to put the ball down before I gave myself a heart attack.

. You relax your grip over time. Here is where things get better for the baby of the family. With your first child you are involved in every aspect of their life. This makes for some ugly scenes during the teen years. With each additional child you relax your grip a little until with the last one you basically give them the car keys when they're 16 and tell them just to stay out of jail.

. You stop trying to be a puppet master. With their first child parents often mistake themselves for God Almighty. They feel they can mold the child like clay, starting when the child is still a toddler. "Look at the way he throws his peas from that high chair," you say. "He's got a great arm. That's a future baseball star there." You have a template you want them to follow, and you fully expect that they'll become an all-star athlete, a millionaire before they're 30, and President of the United States (making sure to tell the whole world in their inauguration speech that you’re the real reason behind their success).

With time comes disappointment, however, and the scaling back of your grand plans. By the time the youngest child comes along you just want them to stay off welfare and not do anything to embarrass the family. A humble job and the ability to meet their mortgage payments are quite enough.

Children are the greatest timepieces ever invented. They grow up so fast that parents find themselves butting up against the reality of Time’s rapid pace. The other day my youngest child, who is now a teenager, found our wedding album in a closet. "Dad, you were actually handsome," she said. "And you had hair."

I looked at the photos from so long ago and once again asked myself where the time has gone. I realized that the father she has is not the same one that her oldest sibling had, in so many ways. But where there's a lack of hair and energy, I think there's a lot more wisdom, so that even though I don't play basketball in the driveway with her, I also don't make the same stupid mistakes I made with my older kids.

She's growing up with a saner, wiser Dad, one who hopefully will guide her through the next few years with enough grace and dignity to make up for a few less basketball games. 

THE END

More On The "Tiger Mother" Controversy

By John McDonnell

My last post got more attention that any other post I've written for this blog. It was about the new book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua.

This book has generated a firestorm of controversy, especially after Amy Chua wrote an essay in the Wall St. Journal about it, titled, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". Chua is getting a lot of flak from bloggers everywhere, and it seems every parent has a strong opinion about her thesis, which is basically that Western parents are too soft on their kids.

Amy Chua has struck a nerve, because that subject is one that every parent I know struggles with. Get a group of parents together these days and invariably the talk turns to their children, and before long they're telling stories about how soft their kids are. Oh, they don’t use words like “soft” or “spoiled”, but that’s the gist of the stories.

If you have teenagers, it’s easy to go on a rant about the sense of entitlement they have, how they whine about the few chores they're asked to do, how they have more money and toys and gadgets than any other generation in history, and so on.

A lot of Western parents these days are asking questions like: Are we raising our kids right? Have we given them too much? Should we have been more demanding, asked more of them? What kind of people are they turning into? Now along comes this Amy Chua person to reinforce our worst fears.

You were too easy on them, she says. You gave them too much, and didn't ask anything of them in return. You should have taught them how to work harder, how to deal with adversity, how to respect their elders, etc., etc.

It's true that when I compare my childhood to the one my kids have, it's like I came from a different planet. I grew up in a house that was hardly bigger than some of the garages I see in the affluent suburb where I live. Of course I had no cell phone, computer, video games, or cable TV, but in my house we didn't even have our own phone line. We had what was called a party line, where you shared the phone line with another house, because the rate was cheaper. We had a big black phone on the wall in the kitchen, and if I wanted to call a friend I had to stand there and talk amidst the hubbub of a family of six, then be ready to hang up in an instant if someone on our party line started dialing the phone on their end.

But it goes further than just being deprived of material possessions. Parents back then demanded more of their kids, and they weren't shy about it. There was a lot of yelling in our house, especially around report card time. It was a kind of yelling that got very personal, and in today's world it would probably be called abuse.

Apparently Asian parents still do this, because Amy Chua admits that she called her daughter "garbage" once when she was particularly angry at her, and another time yelled herself hoarse when her daughter couldn't play a piano piece right.

I have never yelled at my kids like that, because I decided years ago that I didn't agree with that style of parenting. I thought there was a better way, one that wouldn't tear down my kids' self-esteem. I can't help but shake my head in wonderment, however, on the rare occasions when I do raise my voice just a tad, and my kids tell me to stop yelling at them. "Yelling?" I say. "You call that yelling? That's not yelling. I know yelling, and what I did is definitely not yelling."

Would a little more volume in my voice have toughened my kids up, made them more resilient and better able to handle life's down times?

Maybe. But you can't go back, and as I said in my last post, I'm basically happy with how my children are turning out. They are happy, confident, and outgoing. They have opinions, and they're not shy about expressing them. They haven't gotten straight "A's" but they seem able to handle a lot more than just schoolwork in their lives.

The jury's still out, like I said before. But I'm not going to be one of those parents who lacerates myself with guilt because some writer comes out with a glib formula for child-rearing. My parents did their best, but I feel I improved on their methods.

And besides, what worked 30 years ago is not necessarily going to work in today's world. The world my children live in is light years from the one I lived in at their age. They need to be confident, flexible, and adaptable if they’re going to succeed in the the next 30 years. They do not need to be rigid rule followers, because the rules are changing every day. 

These kids need different skill sets to survive in the 21st century.

And learning how to deal with a “Tiger Mother” is not one of them.

Are Chinese Mothers The Best Parents?

 By John McDonnell

One thing about parenting, there’s always somebody telling you that you’re doing it wrong. Mothers-in-law are good at that, along with best-selling books like “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”. This new book by Amy Chua will make even the strictest parents feel like they’re too soft on their kids.

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is basically saying that Asian mothers are more successful parents because they push their kids harder. Amy Chua cheerfully recounts the way she pushed her two daughters to succeed in school by hectoring them constantly to study harder, telling them they couldn't bring home anything less than an "A" in every subject, and not allowing them to have sleepovers, play dates, or extra-curricular activities besides music lessons.

This is a mother who sat in on all her daughters’ music lessons, took notes, and then monitored their practices at home to make sure they were doing what the teacher instructed them to do. Her infamous quote in this regard is that American mothers think one hour of practice is enough. “For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.”

Predictably, this book has generated a storm of protest from guilt-ridden American parents, some of whom resent the implication that they are unconcerned with their children's welfare, that they're absentee moms, and that their children will never succeed in life because they don't know how to work hard.

My wife and I have discussed the book, and so have our four children. The consensus among our kids is that they think Amy Chua is crazy; no surprise there.

We do wonder sometimes if we were too easy on our children, and Amy's strict parenting style seems a reproach when you have kids who were not first in their class in any subject, and who we could barely get to practice 30 minutes on their musical instruments, much less three hours.

There are no instruction manuals when you bring a baby home from the hospital, and although we tried to read the latest books about parenting, when our kids were young we were mostly too busy and too tired to do much reading. We made it up on the fly, based on our own common sense and what we learned from our parents growing up. We made mistakes, in varying degrees, but we also had some successes.

Compared to Amy Chua we were soft American parents. We let the kids have cell phones, sleepovers, and play sports. We did not call them "garbage" (a quote from Amy's book) if they brought home a "B". We did not monitor every minute of their lives.

The jury is still out, but at this point it looks like we raised four kids who are reasonably smart and successful in school, and who have a good deal of self-confidence. They are reasonably independent, and they have good values. Nobody has played the violin at Carnegie Hall, and we have no Ivy League grads so far, but they also haven't made any bad judgments or gone down all the many treacherous paths they could have taken, and people tell us they are all personable, confident, polite, and fun to be around.

The Chinese style of parenting is not for everyone. It's not even for many Chinese, if you believe the reports in the Wall Street Journal that say even in China some parents are trying to loosen their grip, because the government is trying to encourage more creativity and less conformity and rote learning. It seems that maybe the Tiger style of mothering is too harsh, and creates children who grow up to be too reliant on outside forces to motivate them, instead of being motivated from within.

The one thing I know is that the Tiger style of parenting will be a fad for awhile, but then someone else will come along with another approach, and parents will all think they're doing it wrong if they don't follow that approach. The pendulum swings back and forth all the time. I've learned from parenting four kids that there is no template for raising each child, and that what works for one child may not work for his or her sibling. No matter how many parenting books you read, parenting is still a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor.

Tiger mothering may work for tigers, but it has to be modified for humans.

Do We Need A National Day Of Unplugging?

 By John McDonnell

So now we have National Day of Unplugging. It was started last year by Reboot, a group of Jewish professional people who decided that we all spend too much time online, and we need a day to unplug ourselves from our technology and re-experience the wonder of the real world.

According to their Sabbath Manifesto, this year the National Day of Unplugging is from sundown Friday March 4 till sundown Saturday March 5. The folks at Reboot are encouraging everyone to “put down your cell phone, sign out of email, stop your Facebook and Twitter updates”.

It’s not a bad idea, to spend that 24 hours doing something humans have been doing for millennia -- hang out and talk, listen, connect with each other in person.

Here’s a thought, though: How many people have you interacted with in the last month only through online means? It’s probably a lot more than you actually spoke to in person, or even on the phone. And how many people do you interact with online that you haven’t met in person in the last year? Or ever? I have friends and relatives I haven’t spoken to or seen in years, but I communicate with them on a regular basis online. I have classmates from high school I have seen only once or twice at reunions in over 30 years, but we share emails at least once a month.

And how about the people we’ve never met? There’s an English fellow I met 15 years ago on an online message board and I have never seen his picture or heard his voice, but I’ve had enough meaningful conversations with him that I consider him a friend. By contrast I have friends and family members who don’t use email, Facebook or Twitter, and consequently I interact with them less than with this guy from England whom I’ve never met in person.

Whenever I hear people say that technology is isolating us I think of my grandfather. He lived and worked his whole life in Philadelphia, mostly within the confines of an area that was about three miles in diameter. He didn’t have a phone in his house till the 1950s, so he couldn’t call his daughter who moved to Michigan when she got married, or his son who went to college in Maryland. If a friend or family member moved out of the neighborhood, he lost touch with them unless they came back for a visit.

Sure, he had more face-to-face contact with his neighbors than most of us do today. He didn’t have a screen separating him from authentic human interaction. But he also lived in a smaller world than I do. He couldn’t text message or email his kids the way I can, couldn’t send pictures instantly to a daughter in Europe the way I have, and had no chance of meeting or interacting with people who lived in other countries, the way I can.

Whose world was bigger?

Who was more isolated?

I think National Day of Unplugging is a good idea if it makes people get away from their screens for a bit and go outside for a walk, or take a friend out to lunch. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sitting in front of a screen for too long can give you eyestrain, and it’s bad for the circulation. And technology will never satisfy the simple human need for touching and eye contact. However, let’s not lose sight of the fact that technology is helping us all to stay connected in ways that our parents and grandparents could not have dreamed of. Our world is so much bigger and more interesting than it was before, and technology is helping us to meet people and stay in touch with them on a much deeper level than at any time in history.

So, unplug for a day, sure.

But then plug back in again!

The King's Speech And The Art Of Storytelling

By John McDonnell

The other night I saw The King’s Speech, a film about Britain’s King George VI, who had a crippling stammer and overcame it in the 1920s and 30s with the help of an Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue.

You know how when you see a good movie you can’t stop thinking about it, sometimes for days afterward? The King’s Speech has stayed with me for days now, and I keep replaying its scenes in my mind.

And it’s making me realize that I haven’t had that experience in the last several years of moviegoing. It’s been a long time since a movie has had that kind of impact on me.

Why is that? The King’s Speech is an old-fashioned movie, one that emphasizes character development over everything else. There are long scenes with only two characters, King George and the speech therapist, simply talking.

There are no car crashes, alien invasions, cartoon sequences, explosions, earthquakes, or monsters. There are no superheroes. You don’t have to put on 3-D glasses to watch this film.

It’s just people talking, revealing themselves through their conversation, interacting, showing (or trying to hide) their feelings, and doing what humans do every day.

Not much in the slam-bang department, but it’s still powerful stuff.

The reason is that through the course of the film we get to know these characters intimately. We see what their fears are, what motivates them, how they react to stress, what they love, what they hope for. The King, played by Colin Firth, shows his vulnerability, his fear of public speaking, and with every stammering word out of his mouth we see the pain of a troubled childhood.

Lionel Logue, played masterfully by Geoffrey Bush, is a man struggling with his own insecurities, while also trying to make sense of the fact that the King of England has come to him, a commoner from Australia, to ask for help.

These simple but profound scenes are rare in movies today. With all the explosions and special effects going on in movies, there is very little room for character development. It’s almost as if the moviemakers want to keep our eyes busy with a lot of flashing lights so we won’t realize their characters are cardboard-thin and their stories have no coherence or logic.

Or maybe it’s just that directors are like kids playing with toys. They get so wrapped up in all the new technology they forget to tell a story.

Humans have been telling stories to each other for thousands of years, and it’s not hard to do. You simply need to present some rounded, three dimensional characters and give them a conflict to work out. The characters can’t be cardboard cutouts moving against a background of computer graphics. They need to have rough edges. The good guys have to show their weaknesses. The bad guys have to show a common humanity, not simply be cartoonishly bad all the time. The story has to grow out of character conflicts, and you can’t have a superhero come in and rescue them at the end.

I mean, really, for all the hype about last year’s Avatar, did it stay with you for more than a few hours after you saw it? I loved the alien world that was presented in that movie, but I forgot about it an hour after I left the theater. The characters and their problems just didn’t seem real to me, didn’t grab me. The King’s Speech, however, was made for a tenth of the price of Avatar, and had not a single special effect, yet I’ve been thinking about it all week.

For my money, that’s a real story.