Hickory nuts

I collected hickory nuts today and it reminded me of my Dad.

When my family moved to Lockwood Avenue in Greenville, the property came with two important features: a brick grill and a hickory tree. The brick grill ended up being useless - I was eventually paid to break the bricks and haul it away.

But the other feature - the hickory tree, was important.

Before Dad would grill out, he would send me out to collect hickory nuts for the fire.  There was only one tree, and so collecting was pretty easy.  I would come back with a couple of cupfulls from every foraging session.  Dad would add it to the fire, and the result was perfect, smoky meat.

I the beauty of hindsight, there is probably no better way to engage a pyro kid somewhere other than the firepit than to give him a task specifically designed to keep him a safe distance from the fire.

By the time he is back, the fire has started to die down.  And the real work of grilling can begin.

I have a pet theory, that the skill of carving meat and grilling skips a generation.  I honestly believe that the accomplished grillmaster cannot let a child take the job - a task that he has perfected over the years by trial and error - and destroy a piece of meat.  And by controlling the fire, he effectively removes the knowledge from being passed along to the next generation.

By the time the following generation comes around, the grillmaster seeks to share the knowledge and wisdom of a thousand steaks.  The grandchild then becomes the fire-priest-in-training, eventually supplanting the old generation.

Dad had lots of reasons for keeping his little firebug away from the grill.  But the unintended consequence is that I have no idea what I am doing when the coals get hot.  I re-invent the wheel.  Every.  Single.  Time.

 Nevertheless, the lesson of the hickory continues.  And as long as I am grilling, and re-learning the process, I'll be reading, guessing, scorching, charring, dripping, re-heating, and eating delicious failures and scrumptious successes.  And with each one, when it is available, I will be charring some hickory nuts while I do.  And wondering whether Dad was just sending me on a mission, or whether he really did like the flavor.

I am thinking maybe he did.  And that getting the kid away from the fire was pure lagniappe.

This year, Remi, Gabi and I built a firepit.  We grilled on it, and I explained to Remi that I was just making it up - I had no special knowledge about grilling.  And in the process, he and I both started, once again, to learn how to char meat.  This time, we did it together.

So after the kids left. I found myself with bratwurst on the fire, thinking of what Independence Day really means.  I learned a lot about fire, but did so under the watchful eye of my dad.  Even if he was not sharing his grill with me, he watched his pyro develop.  And start fires of his own.

We don't ever really become independent.  We rely on the knowledge of what went before, and break away, trying to make it better.  Sometimes, we burn the brisket.  Other times, we get it right.

And sometimes, we just get to watch the fire, and marvel at how wonderful the smell of hickory really flavors our lives so perfectly.

Is Half-Staff the Norm?

The US Flag outside the Mississippi River Commission building was at half staff last week.

Again.

I subscribe to a website that alerts me as to the status of the flag. After working on a military base for a while, I felt like I needed to know WHY the flag was not at full staff.  The website would give me an update.

Most of the time, I would already know.  Head of state died.  Memorial Day.  September 11.  Pearl Harbor.

Other times, we fly the flag at half staff for a presidential declaration because of the death of an official, former officials, or foreign dignitaries. Or the president may order half-staff display of the flag after other tragic events (half mast, by the way, is aboard a ship - thanks, Uncle Google!).

But these declarations are no longer the exception.  They are the rule.

Just since Memorial Day, we have flown the flag at half staff:

- between the 12th and the 16th of June in response to the Orlando killings.

- between July 8th and July 12th for the Dallas shootings.

- three days later, for the Nice incident - July 15 through July 19.

We didn't even get through the mourning period for Nice before we had another proclamation:

HONORING THE VICTIMS OF THE ATTACK IN BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA - - - - - - - BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION As a mark of respect for the victims of the attack on police officers perpetrated on Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, July 22, 2016.

In total, 69 proclamations have been made during the Obama presidency, and 170 days that the flag has flown at half staff in the past year.  When you add in the proclamations by the state governors (who can also issue a flag proclamation in their state), 336 days of the past year have I went through the list, and it is not an Obama thing - not as if he is making proclamations right and left. It is just a shocking level of violence that

Take a look at the list just in the past year: (Nancy Reagan and Antonin Scalia are added in, as well).

Fort Hood.

Chattanooga.

Roseburg, Oregon.

San Bernadino.

Orlando.

Dallas.

Baton Rouge.

Paris.

Brussels.

Nice.

Which one had you forgotten, off that list? (For me, it was the Umpqua shooting.  I suspect that our hearts can only hold a certain amount of violence at a time).

The issues are complex.  The list does not just represent terrorism.  Or police deaths. Or victims of hate crimes.  Or school shootings.

It is all of this and more.  And I am finding my heart broken anew, every day.  And worrying that I am developing scar tissue, where that raw emotion used to be. Am I getting jaded?  Do I just expect violence to be part of my society?  Have I given up on a hope of a peaceful society, where we expect our citizens to die of, oh, I don't know.... old age?

Am I accustomed to seeing the flag at half staff?

Can I afford to be?

Everyone is passionate about their answer. 

More guns are the answer.  Stricter gun laws are the answer.

Police sensitivity training is the answer.  Increasing police budgets is the answer. 

Getting rid of all foreigners is the answer.  Embracing a multicultural society is the answer.

Being polite to the police is the answer.  Revamping the idea of police is the answer.

Being liberal is the answer.  Being conservative is the answer.

I lived for more than a year in a country where the violence was completely out of hand.  Murders, domestic violence, assassinations, drug wars, violence against indigenous peoples... Guatemala had it all.  I am not unfamiliar with what it is like to live in a battle zone.

But as the violence escalates around me, and as I hear my friends on social media all echo the same refrain - STOP KILLING PEOPLE! - I worry that I am beginning to accept the violence in my world as background noise.  I worry that I am living my life expecting the flag to always be at half staff.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

Richard Hansen, the Commander of New Orleans District, is headed to his next deployment in Afghanistan for his next assignment.  I wish him good luck and godspeed in his work. And I pray for his safe return. 

A few years ago, I watched a fascinating bit of pageantry within the Corps of Engineers, as the Hurricane Protection Office - who oversaw the building of the levees following Katrina - changed their leadership in a Change of Command Ceremony.  I wrote up a quick overview, and laughed about it with some friends.

I saw another CoCC this past week, as the New Orleans commander was replaced with a new Colonel.   It was different.  But some of the elements remained the same.

From the original:

It was a lovely service, with a retired Lieutenant Colonel singing the national anthem (beautiful voice), a good, stirring speech from the Brigadier General, and brief remarks by the outgoing Colonel (he is going to lead the Corps effort in Afghanistan) and the incoming Colonel.

But I found the actual ritual of change of command fascinating as an anthropological insight into Corps mentality.

As a narrator (a captain whose public reading skills had definitely not figured into his promotions) described the scene from the podium, the highest ranking Noncom in the Hurricane Protection Office approaches the flags on the right of the stage, removes the corps colors from the stand, and performs a smart about face.  He then marches to a spot in front of the assembled crowd, and turns to face the small group at the front of the room.  With his arms extended holding the colors, he makes his presentation to the civilian in the middle of the huddle.  The civilian turns to his left and hands the flag to the outgoing Colonel, who turns and presents it to the Brigadier General, who turns and presents it to the incoming Colonel, who extends his arms to give it back to the Noncom.  The Noncom marches back over to the stand, forcefully places the flag into the stand with a "HOOOAH!", and everyone goes back to where they were before the ceremony.

OK, let me see if I have this right.  The guy reading from the script gets lost, repeatedly, on the page.  The General flies into New Orleans on the government jet (the one I made turn around because I stole the pilot's computer) to pass a flag from one officer to another.  A civilian, looking uncomfortable in the whole mix, acts as an intermediary between the Noncom and the outgoing Colonel, but is not involved from that point forward and never interacts with the General.  The Colonels do not actually interact with one another.  And the end result involves the Noncom enthusiastically putting things back the way they were before any of this happened, and shouting out that the task is complete.

Synopsis of the synopsis: we got fired up to do something nobody wanted done, involved a bunch of brass with pomp and circumstance, shouted that we did it, and when we were done, everything was exactly the way it was beforehand.

Some days it seems like that ceremony is a perfect metaphor for what we are doing.

2016 New Orleans Change of Command Ceremony. 

Because outdoors in June in New Orleans is the best.

 The ceremony this time around was a little more tame, and a little less a metaphor for the work we do.  But I am keenly aware of how much the change of command disrupts the way we do business.

Two months ago, I was deployed to help the communities in Louisiana recover after flooding took out much of the states (this time, not from hurricanes; YAY!), and was gone for a month. It was a critical time that I was gone; we bought a house and moved, the job got very intense, and the class I was taking reached a fever pitch.

The initial agreement was that I was to get a replacement that would go down at the same time as I was there, we would talk about how we had done the work last time, and then I would leave.  And from home, I would provide remote support for the replacement, coming down to help when we have public meetings, writing, reading, and researching.  But I would not have to be there for the day-to-day.

Two weeks after I arrived, there was no sign that anyone was going to back me up.  My boss was a little nervous, and I was under some pressure to get home. 

Finally, Jeff joins me.  He is brilliant, hard working, and has a great attitude.  That is, his attitude is much like mine - a little snarky, a little funny, and hiding a thoughtful demeanor behind a happy-go-lucky outlook.

He also makes a mean sazerac...

Anyway, we worked together in Baton Rouge for a couple weeks more, and I handed the reins over to him, with a promise to help him any way I could.

Slam that flag down into the stand and shout "HOOOAH!"

While I was deployed, I had several projects that had been nearing the hot seat.  They got there while I was gone. 

Two of my teammates, Mincer and Sarah, picked up the baton and kept running, even while other stuff was piling on their plates.  But they saw the need to get stuff done, and without ceremony (see what I did there?) they took on the tasks and got them done.  Even when the burrocratic Vogons were standing in the way ("You need two spaces after the header, not one.  Print it out and bring it to me") they got the job done.

Hoooah.  (Less enthusiasm, perhaps?)

After I returned, the heat kicked up on a number of my projects, many of which were getting started before I came on board.  One particular project requires me to identify participants across the Division, and ask them to make time for the work I have for them to do.  With no compensation.  And no reward for doing the job.  No incentive at all.  My predecessor had managed, but all of the people on his list have taken jobs elsewhere - some elsewhere in the Corps, and some outside of government service.  So my job now is to convince some bosses that the work is important enough to dedicate someone to do it, who will do a good job and do it gladly for nothing but an attaboy. 

Never mind.  Just hand me the flag.  hooah

Best of luck to Colonel Clancy.  Looking forward to working with you, sir.

Happy as my dog

I want to be as happy as my dog.

Lucie is a simple creature.  People are always talking about how smart their dog is, how great an instinct for hunting it has, what great championship lines he claims, how obedient she is, what a great protector she is...

My dog has none of these things.

She is not gifted with great intelligence.  She looks blankly at me when I give her a command.  And it is not defiance.  She simply does not understand.  She cocks her head to the side, trying to figure it all out.  And then happily goes back to what she was doing.

She is no mighty hunter.  She is very excited about chasing dust motes and sunbeams.  She will spend hours jabbing her snout at a sunbeam in the house, and get very excited when her ID tags sparkle in the light.  She will chase a laser until she drops from exhaustion, and there is little that gives her more joy than going into the back yard and looking for worms.  But she has not a single idea of what tracking is, or even what to do when she sees a squirrel.

                                  Lucie, entertaining herself by hunting the mighty sunbeam.


But the moment you spray water from the garden hose, especially when the sun is shining, and the kaleidoscope of the crystal sparkles everywhere, that is the thing that just sends her into ecstasy.  Nothing gives her greater pleasure than the hose.  She hunts droplets, flashing in the sun, with all of the fire and passion that most of us reserve for football games.  At the end of any hose romp, she returns, exhausted and muddy and with the waggiest tail you can imagine, thumping tail so hard against the furniture that she risks injury.

Lucie, watching the hose from inside.

Lucie has no papers.  She was one dog of many that a friend had in a couple of litters that her dachshunds had.  There is no championship line there.  

There is also no urge to protect.  She will sound the alarm, and she is brave (even when the vacuum monster comes out).  But she does not seem to sound the alarm to any purpose.  It is just an alarm.  And when it is done, she goes back to doing what she was doing before she barked.  Which usually involves chasing sunlight, somewhere in the house.

Lucie is none of the things that you brag on your dog about.  

What she is, however, is happy.  Joyful.  Loving.  Sweet.  Gentle.  

I go through my life with complicated interactions.  I am pretty good about not taking it personally, and very rarely hold grudges.  But there is complicated math going on any time there is a favor requested or performed.  Shifting allegiances as work that needs to be done competes with personal relationships.  Temporary alliances where I hold my nose and work with someone who angered me last week.  

But my dog does none of that.  She loves you.  She loves me.  She loves Kathe. She loves visitors.  She loves the postman.  She takes joy in being fed.  She loves being petted, but only for a minute, because she has important work to do, chasing and killing those light sparkles, over and over again.  

Tail wagging like mad.

Paul Simon wrote a song called 'One Trick Pony' (the album was immortalized in Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe credits), and the lyrics from the song are the best part of the album:

He makes it look so easy
He looks so clean
He moves like God’s
Immaculate machine
He makes me think about
All of these extra moves I make
And all this herky-jerky motion
And the bag of tricks it takes
To get me through my working day
One-trick pony

Lucie is that one-trick pony.  Tail wagging like mad. Compulsively licking the hand of whoever is holding her.  Loving with everything she has.

And then jumping back down in search of the sparkle.

I think I'll find my sparkle tomorrow. ....Or maybe I'll decide to find it tonight.

Switchbacks

You know that feeling, when you are a passenger in a car being driven through the mountains, and you lean into the curves just a little too early, or a little too late?  As a driver, you never get the sensation -  you know exactly when the car will respond, because you are in control.

But as the passenger, you get all of the thrills of a roller coaster ride with none of the built-in security features that roller coasters are required to have.

I was surprised to find myself thinking of being a passenger in the mountains this weekend.  When we bought the house, it came with a lovely piece of lagniappe (see my blog entry on that term here).  In addition to owning a lovely house, we now also own a baby grand piano.

Yes.  The house comes partially furnished.  No, they did not leave the refrigerator.  No washer/dryer, either.

But we got ourselves a baby grand.

Our new piano.

It is an Ellington piano, which is was manufactured by Baldwin in the 1920s.  It has a lovely brown mahogany body, and was clearly in dire need of a little TLC.  One of the first things I did when I came into the house during our recon visit was to sit down and surreptitiously check out the tuning.

It was bad.  It was fingernails-on-chalkboard bad.  I grew up playing a piano that had been moved - twice - without being tuned.  So somewhat out-of-tune pianos are not such a big deal to me.  But this?  I have uploaded the video of the chromatic scale to youtube to show how awful it was.

Kathe ended up calling The Piano Man, a local piano tuner out of Jackson, MS.  I was there for some of the tuning (I had bought tools so that I could try and tune it myself, and Kathe wisely - and sneakily - called for a professional to do it before I could do any irreparable damage.)  And it was a pretty amazing process. (I still maintain I would have done a decent job, and I really, really, really wanted 'piano tuning' on my Renaissance Man Resume).

What I discovered after fifteen minutes of listening to him tune the piano

O. B. E.

My agency is civilian military, which means we civilians keep our hair long, we don't have daily PT, and our 'uniform' is 'don't wear offensive clothes'.  We do, however, have a certain amount of military in our organization: we answer to a hierarchy, culminating at the Commander in Chief (with several Generals in between), we get deployed, we get issued travel orders, and we work to 'execute our mission'.  It is an odd blend of a very few green suiters and a bunch of civilians.

But the acronyms define us as military more than any other element.

We have HSDRRS ('hisdoctors'), BUDMAT, PDT, MOA, MOU, IEPR, WBV, LPV, NOV/NFL, CAP, LGM, HNC, SELA, CG, ASA(CW).... we use acronyms more than we use verbs.  One of my goals as a federal burrocrat is to complete an entire sentence, un-self-consciously, without using real words.

One of the lesser used acronyms that I have gotten some mileage out of recently is OBE. Many know the phrase, but for those who don't, it stands for Overcome By Events.  It means that the task (or mission) that you were assigned to do has become unnecessary because of external events.

Example:
A friend of mine, a branch chief, had been instructed to move the offices of all of his people to a different space.  The move was in full swing, but he had not spent much time preparing for the move of his personal office.  That kind of inaction would not be unusual for me; I love waiting until the deadline and then jamming everything into boxes, and slamming them into the new space.  My friend, however, is usually more methodical in his approach.

It got to where people were starting to be concerned about whether he would be able to do it on the timeline.

Two days before the deadline, the office brass announced that my friend had been selected as the candidate for a major promotion.  He was going to be moving.  But to a different office.

His original move was O.B.E.

Shortly after moving to Vicksburg, I came across another example of OBE that pleased me, and is on the grandest scale possible.

View of Vicksburg from the water.

In the War between the States, the Mississippi River traveled a path that led right by Vicksburg.  Vicksburg is built on a 125-foot bluff overlooking the river - and its strategic value for the war cannot be overstated*.  At the top of the bluff is a great place to put a cannon or twenty, and the cannons made passage of Union boats through the riverbend challenging. Maj. General US Grant, after a certain amount of time, decided that enough was enough.

And he set about to change it.

In a move that mirrored the labors of Hercules, Grant decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to divert the river.  

Map of Vicksburg, modified to show Grant's Canal
in red. Image stolen from Civil War website.

The Mississippi River.

Unlike Hercules, he did not make the cut himself.  But he did instruct his troops to start the process, with the intention of cutting off the loop to the north that made the river cross in front of Vicksburg.  And allow his steamboats to pass through unmolested.

He also laid siege to the city from the other side.  There is a huge military park that lays out the 90-day siege, where the different companies from the different states were located for the full time.  Each state has its own monument, and it is a lovely place, if ever you are in town.

The siege (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was a success, eventually, and Vicksburg was surrendered to the Union army.  

Once the city fell, there was no need to redirect the river, and the effort to make the cut was abandoned.

Grant's cut was O.B.E.  It was overcome by events.

The cut is there, with a small bronze plaque describing the event, immediately across the river, visible from I-20.  


postscript:

In memoirs, Grant suggested that much of his reason for undertaking the effort was to keep his men busy; he was not convinced that his engineers were right.  For what it is worth, a few years later, the Mississippi River did naturally what Grant had decided to engineer.  IN the flood of 1876, the flooding river forced a new passageway, carving a new channel just south of the city.  The oxbow lake that remained was called Centennial Lake, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the US.  

Fascinating article on Grant's cut here. Worth it for the images alone.
Grant's memoirs available online here.


*President Lincoln quotes, re: Vicksburg
"See what a lot of land these fellows hold, of which Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket." 
"We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg. It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the states of the far South, and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference." 
"I am acquainted with that region and know what I am talking about, and, as valuable as New Orleans will be to us, Vicksburg will be more so."

"If I had known, I would never have bought this house"

As my team and I are driving through the post-flood areas of Monroe, Louisiana, we stop and ask residents about flooding depths for the recent disaster.  Mostly, people are willing to talk - we serve as confessor and sounding board and, eventually, hopefully, as financial intercessor with the funding folks.

And people want us to hear what their experience was.

So more than once, I entered into a conversation with people involved with a recently minted, and unannounced disaster, and began to hear their story.  And every time, the story involves a combination of limited resources, inability to move, repetitive damages ("this is the third time in five years we have had to move our stuff off the floor to avoid getting it wet!") and poor infrastructure.

Believe me, if these folks had the resources to not live in the floodplain, they would not live in the floodplain.

So I hopped out of the car at 3pm to ask an older man sitting in his driveway.

"You lost?" he asked, not unkindly.

Fair enough. We had driven through the neighborhood twice.

"No, sir.  Just working with a recovery group to see if we can figure out where the floodwaters came, and how high they were.  Did your house flood?"

"Yeah, it did!  Come on inside and I'll show you!"

Once I am inside, his wife explains to me from her chair in the den that he has Alzheimers, and that he confuses the different flooding events.

The house has been updated to allow for cleanup.  Flooring that can be squeegied.  Concrete blocks at the ready to put sofa up higher, out of the expected floodwaters.

Let me say that again.  Expected floodwaters.

Because even people who can't afford to move can afford concrete blocks.

While I was there, their daughter called, and she wanted to know WHO THE HELL WAS IN THE HOUSE AND WHO SENT HIM TO COME INSIDE!?!

I explained, as calmly as I could, that nobody sent me.  That I understood the concern.  And that I had had zero intention of coming in.  I just asked a question, and had come inside by invitation.  The wife nodded, because my explanation made sense.  And conveyed that to the daughter, who was doing her job to protect the family.

As I was taking my leave, the old man looked at me and said, "We keep getting flooded, over and over again.  If I had known it was going to be like this, I never would have bought this house."

That story.  Repeated in communities across the parish, the state, the nation.  Ending up with limited hope, limited options, and no opportunities, and then being blamed - in the media, in the federal agencies that support recovery, even in the charitable organizations who are trying to help - for being too stupid to realize the danger.  For choosing poorly.

And that is those media outlets that even cover it.  Have you seen the damage from the Louisiana floods in March?  Any coverage at all?  Is there a demand that Congress support these folks?

If so, I haven't seen it.

It keeps me up at night.  It makes me wake up angry, and determined to see past what can be done, to what needs to be done.  To look outside the box for solutions that will help build communities, provide opportunities, and introduce basic services to areas that don't have them.

For all that Reagan was right about the nine most terrifying words in the English language*, it is a moral imperative that we use those words.  And that we use the opportunity to help people. To provide information to communities reeling after a disaster.

To live up to the position that I hold, as public servant.


*The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
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